


The Vengeance of a Dewdrop

by argus



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Angst, Because I refuse to see it, Blood and Gore, Character Death, Complete, Did I mention the angst and feelings?, Dreams vs. Reality, Explicit Sexual Content, Feelings, Harm to Children, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Lots and lots of angst and feelings, M/M, Medical Experimentation, Mindfuck, Murder, Not Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie) Compliant, Past Child Abuse, Porn with Feelings, Psychological Trauma, Science Fiction, Slow Burn, at least not yet, gammafrost - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-08
Updated: 2019-01-25
Packaged: 2019-07-28 07:05:44
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 30
Words: 64,816
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16236665
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/argus/pseuds/argus
Summary: Loki seeks and gets vengeance on The Hulk for foiling his plans.But all is not as it seems, by any stretch of the imagination.And two monsters find tenuous commonality in a world as fragile as a dewdrop in the sun.Spoilers for Thor 3.





	1. Prologue

Pain radiated through every destroyed bone in his body. Each frantic beat of his heart pumped throbbing fire through his ragged veins. He couldn't breathe, he couldn't close his eyes, he could hardly even _think_ through the surprising crimson heat that sped mercilessly from his deformed chest and crushed limbs into every nerve ending. He could barely hear the words from his vanquisher who loomed overhead like a petulant dragon.  But those words tiptoed into his brain and settled there with an ever-increasing and loathsome weight.  
"Puny god."

 

***

 

His list of enemies was nearly numberless. The Trickster pondered from his seat, his long body stretched languidly on a conjured chaise overlooking a remote frontier world of the Light Elves. It was hot and barren here in the desert ruins where he'd made his temporary encampment. The sand seemed to extend endlessly, and the heat contrasted well with his icy constitution. His mind's eye drifted from one face to the next and he took a sip of sweet wine as he schemed.

The majority of his enemies could be neatly grouped: lesser demons, soulless mercenaries, profaned holy men, goddesses of finite creativity, and other minor irritants. There were only a chosen few creatures in the universe who stirred his ire to a level worthy of conscious thought. Malekith was one, now defeated. Thor, another: an eternal thorn in his side. The mere thought of Odin was enough to break his concrete countenance into a chiseled grimace of loathing. Then there was Cardinal Azmar of Niflheim, that odious and rigid creature. And Thanos and his cadre of death who would need to be dealt with sooner or later. Sif was a minor annoyance.  Especially in comparison to the mortal Jane Foster who'd seen fit to curtail his initial foray on Midgard. His nostrils flared at the impudence of that _ant_.

Amazingly, another mortal had recently joined the ranks of Loki's premier enemies. He was a vexing insect buzzing and biting perpetually at his brain. Bruce Banner.  The timid human who had transformed into a grotesque creature before his very eyes and demolished all of his careful plans as easily as a child toppled toy blocks. It was infuriating!  Not even his clandestine usurpation of the Asgardian throne could diminish his growing hatred for Banner.

 _How_ by the nine realms did Midgard _breed_ such creatures?! They were so fragile and so unaccountably bold. The Foster woman, with her imbecilic and wholly unfounded bravery. Tony Stark, so crude and completely unprepared to accept the existence of technology perpendicular to his own. The faces of various "mutants", as some called themselves, flashed in his mind's eye briefly. All of them were unaware of their tiny place in the universe, thinking themselves privileged and untouchable. What a narrow, childish perspective.

But the worst of them all was Banner. He was a mere monster, unthinking, blind to higher faculties or strategies. And he pummeled Loki like a rag doll. Beat his physical body into a contemptuous pile of blood, gore, shredded muscles, and pain. How dare he?! A creature of a few mere decades, looming over and sneering at a god who'd seen time millennial.

Yes, in his languid musings, Bruce Banner was public enemy number one. He finished the pilfered wine in one swallow, the golden liquid barely dulling his senses. Banner had once been a crucial chess piece in his path to obliterate his other enemies. Perhaps he still was? Certainly, he could not face Thanos or Thor or Odin until the beast was either vanquished or, preferably, under his utter control. A slender smirk split his lips and he bared his teeth at the horizon menacingly. The 'hulk' would know fear. And he would taste it one drop at a time at Loki's pleasure.

 


	2. Chapter 2

Bruce Banner had found temporary lodging in Stark Tower, under the watchful eye of Tony and JARVIS. It was not a home, it never really could be, but it provided him with shelter, sustenance both nutritious and mentally stimulating, and a modicum of safety from military powers who coveted the Hulk's destructive strength for their own ambitions. SHIELD, stripped of extra-judicial power following the Chitauri invasion, had gone into research overdrive. It was only natural following the decimation of New York and Thor's ominous intimation of stronger foes on the horizon. The aborted invasion of the Dark Elves was a sign: like seawater ebbing from the beach before a tsunami.

Bereft of any Infinity Stones to research directly, Tony and Bruce threw themselves into dissecting the recorded energy signatures of those they'd encountered. Already, math was being re-written. Erik Selvig was invited and had taken up residence in Stark Tower along with Taiko Izumi, leading researcher in Game Theory and Applied Topology and Jimmy Coburn, MIT materials scientist and dashing surfer/instagram celebrity. Jane Foster had curtly declined Nick Fury's obsequious invitation, distancing herself from SHIELD and their games by burying herself in her own radio astronomy and theoretical physics research. Even Reed Richards was supporting their efforts remotely: throwing in the brute force of his supercomputers to assist in data crunching.

All in all, Stark Tower was a scientific paradise unexpectedly erupting from the streets of Manhattan. Bruce was enthralled at his inclusion among such brilliant minds but his skeptical nature kept him from fully embracing their friendship in Tony's crafted academic utopia.

As he worked, something lingered at the back of Bruce's mind. Loki. He had been defeated in New York, transported to Asgard in chains, but had appeared at Thor's side in the brief footage collected during the battle in London with Malekith. Thor now spoke highly of his brother and mourned his glorious loss in battle. How was this possible? Bruce's logical mind could not reconcile the two appearances.  Loki: brow heavy with righteous might, fighting off alien elves for the sake of Earth versus the haughty entitled anger that speared into his consciousness even through the fog of the Hulk in full rage transformation during the Battle for New York City. How could two such opposite creatures exist in the same body?

Which was the true Loki, and which was the fraud? Or were they both truthfully representative of the crazed god?  Two sides mashed together in utter insanity?  Two men occupying the same dichotomous being?

"Earth to Bruce, come in Bruce?" Tony appeared in his vision, face plastered with false sincerity. "You in there, buddy?"  
"Sorry, Tony. I stayed up too late last night with Taiko and Erik." He removed his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose in reflex, willing his pensive thoughts away. Despite his many degrees, he couldn't simply tread water and keep pace with the award-winning scholars around him. He shouldn't be wasting oxygen by psycho-analyzing some crazy daydream.

Chaos. That's what it was, not a daydream. The god of lies and entropy willed it into existence, even in his absence. Bruce couldn't shake the memory of piercing hatred that Loki leveled at him after the Battle for New York.  Just before he and Thor departed for Asgard, Tesseract in tow. It was a look that carried the weight of ages and a chilling promise to return. Not even a promise.  An inevitability. 

Bruce shivered despite the heat and poured himself another cup of herbal tea. All his best efforts could not prevent him from pondering that look of sheer malice for the remainder of the day.

 

***

 

Midgardian magic or 'technology' as they phrased it, was an interesting but unnecessarily over-complicated thing. It look Loki only a day and a half to unravel how to work a computer, how to navigate the internet, how to identify government information sources. By twilight the following day, he had successfully hacked into the Department of Defense's personnel files. From there, he found General Ross. And from there, Bruce Banner.

Doctor Banner's power, like many 'gifted' creatures in this realm, was the cause of unexpected fate. So many creatures like Banner been thrust, unaware and infantile, into the arms of power. Totally unprepared to harness their newfound strengths.

And they were all the weaker for it. Banner, likely drunk on his own ego, had experimented on himself with some classified technology. Against all possibility, he'd come out the other side not only alive, but in possession of a power hundreds of thousands of times greater than any other mortal. There were no measurements to quantify the Hulk. It was simply not in their vocabulary. As Loki read through Banner's dossier, he learned of subsequent 'scientific' experiments to understand his strength.  All utterly fruitless. Of the inestimable pain borne by this abominable creature. The source of his inhuman strength, his near limitless capabilities. Loki's eyes sparkled and lips parted in a smirk... it was also a potential weakness to be exploited.

 

  
***

 

Some days it felt like the answers were coming too easily. Progress on the Tesseract and Aether's energy signatures simply fed answer after answer into the textbooks of astrophysics, relativity, and quantum mechanics. A unified theory was probably too much to hope for, but its search had, amazingly, taken a back seat to the other discoveries the Stark/Richards team keep unveiling. It was too much. It led Bruce to ask:

"What are we missing, here?" Jimmy and Erik looked up from their StarkPads quizzically.  
"What do you mean?" the elder scientist asked in his gravelly voice.  
"I-I don't know, I'm not complaining about the progress we're making, but maybe we're looking at this from too narrow a lens." Bruce pushed his glasses up on his head and he started sketching on the whiteboard. He loved all of Tony's AR and holo gadgetry, but sometimes his best thinking came at the end of an old-fashioned piece of chalk or a dry-erase marker. And he did love to draw.

"We've been attacking these energy signatures. The Tesseract for example: its ability to amplify thought, to warp space-time, to re-write our concepts of game theory, probability. Heck, we've even got Richard's data-center running quantum computing simulations."  
"But?"  
"But... that's one slice of the whole picture. This is... this is like the discovery of the internet, or harnessing electricity, or even the invention of fire. There must be so many more applications that we're not even considering."

"I'm with you, Bruce. What are you thinking?" Jimmy's youthful face nodded earnestly in his direction, encouraging.   
"Let's just start brainstorming." Bruce started scrawling ideas across the hastily cleaned whiteboard. "Biology, maybe? Medicine, materials science, genetic engineering, global warming, atomic energy, psychology, even?" He may have lost them there, receiving two blank stares from two very smart individuals. "Alright maybe; maybe not." His arms couldn't sit still, gesturing to illustrate his point. "But I do think we need to think _broader_ than we have, as tempting as it is to keep digging in one direction."

"When there's a gold vein, m'boy, you don't start digging in another area," Selvig chuckled. "But I see your point. We small group may miss something.  Instead we could outline ideas and hand them off to another research team."  
"Crowdsourcing! I get it!" Jimmy's eyes were alight.  
"Yeah... bingo. I'd hate for us to get so far down one path looking for DARPA-net version 2.0 that we miss out on the next eBay." Jimmy's eyes went blank, but Selvig chuckled at the retro reference.  
"Let me round up Taiko, Tony, and I'll message Reed. I'm sure they'll agree." Erik started to walk from the room, a delighted grin splitting his rugged features. "Jimmy, m'boy, you order up some pizza and beer. If my gut is right, this will be a long night."

 

***

 

Selvig was not wrong. It was a long couple of _days_ , the outcome of which included sending some interesting suggestions to a team at Cal-Tech working on photosynthetic bio-implants.  Reed Richards was now hot on the idea of an improvement to his suit architecture.  Taiko tossed a rough draft for phase-change manipulation of low-hanging clouds to the team at NOAA. Amidst all the chaos, Richard's face streamed through a hologram in Tony's lab.  
"Banner, my hat's off. You're giving Edison a run for his money." Tony scoffed in good humor, his ego lightly bruised.  
" _Edison_?! You forget, you're all in the presence of a genius inventor playboy extraordinaire." Bruce chuckled in his trademark dry delivery.  
"We're just trying to get all the benefit we can get from a little cube that caused us so much trouble. But hey, Richards - if you get some benefit from that new suit material, send it my way. Tony doesn't pay me enough to afford all the clothes the Hulk destroys."  
"I don't pay you enough? I don't pay you at all!" The room descended into laughter.

Was this what it felt like to belong?  To be part of a family? If so, Bruce could definitely get used to this.

 

  
***

 

 

Who was it that said: 'all good things must come to an end'?

The hair on the back of Bruce's neck stood at attention as he watched a freeze-frame of a blurry video plastered across the television in one of Stark Tower's many lounges. Nick Fury held the remote control between his fingers, arm outstretched for dramatic effect.  
"Any guesses on our unwelcome guest?" he drawled. Black Widow cocked an eyebrow.  
"Looks like Loki, smells like Loki, must _be_ Loki?"  
"Interpol picked up this security footage last night after their facial recognition algorithms alerted them to the possibility of another Asgardian in our presence." He paused for effect. "Thor, penny for your thoughts?"  
The room was silent as each of the Avengers eyes tried to piece together the blurry pixels in a way that didn't show them an image of the walking dead.  
"Loki was killed by the villain Malekith. He is no more among the living." He sighed heavily. "As much as I wish it were not so, Director, my brother is not on Midgard but in Valhalla." Bruce badly wished he could believe Thor's words, but the grainy black and white image staring at him enlarged and plastered across Tony's 10 foot screen said different.

"Thor, as much as it pains me, I have to side with Fury." Tony grimaced. "Oooh, yeah... That stings," he embellished mockingly. "But seriously, Loki is _The_ trickster to end all tricksters. No body, no proof. We've got a responsibility to investigate this image as a legitimate threat." As the room bickered around him, Bruce maintained his silence. He pushed his glasses back up the bridge of his nose and squinted, trying in vain to resolve a different image in the pixels rather than the apparent harbinger of chaos.

If it was Loki, he hadn't changed very much in the intervening years. Same slicked back hair, same aristocratic lift of chin. Despite the lack of clarity in the image, Bruce didn't doubt those eyes held a piercing disregard for qualities as feeble as empathy and humility. The Hulk was the last Avenger other than Thor to face Loki. If The Trickster were back on Earth, it was only a matter of time before Bruce's alter ego was called out to battle again and Bruce was 'requested' to to surrender the tenuous control he fought to retain at every waking moment. The scientist fought a sudden urge to bolt from the room, instead holding his fingers against his opposite wrist, counting the beats in his racing pulse as the panic gradually receded.

 

 

***

 

 

Mercifully life for the next week continued at the same pace as before. Taiko and Erik scrawled calligraphic formulas across holographic chalkboards while Jimmy and Tony put Dum-E mark 5 to the test assembling castings for their prototype Quinjet armor alloys. Bruce floated between the two groups effortlessly, grease painting his forearms as the three men struggled with experimental machinery in the morning, then losing himself in the tapestries of theoretical mathematics late into the evenings. There were no further sightings of Loki for six days. Six days in which the Asgardian prince stalked every unoccupied moment in Bruce's mind.

AVENGERS ASSEMBLE

And then it all came crashing down around him, his nervous fears manifesting themselves in grandiose fashion. A slight dark wisp of a figure was spotted floating around the face of the Statue of Liberty, far on the horizon from their vantage point in Stark Tower.

This devil gnat swooped across the pallid green structure, an arching coil of orange fire casting out from his arm like a whip, stroking lightly across Lady Liberty's neck. In a surreal moment, the great statue's head tilted and slowly slid out of place, careening through the air to land with a horrific cloud of water in the mouth of the Hudson River.

Bruce was struck dumb in place. Decapitating the Statue of Liberty? To what end? The act was defiance incarnate. There was no visible army this time, no massive battlefield. Simply a black menacing figure, floating above the river. He was sure that if he'd had Hawkeye's vision, he'd see the dark god's head thrown back in peals of manic, triumphant laughter. The next few minutes were a blur, rushing to a Quinjet with Black Widow, Hawkeye, and Captain America.  Thor raced ahead like a torpedo, followed closely by Tony's red angry blur. An eye-blink after Widow set the jet down on Liberty Island, Bruce was exiting down the ramp with Clint and Steve. Trepidation settled around Bruce's shoulders like an icy fog.  

"Doctor Banner!" Loki's eyes pierced him alone out of the melee. "We have unfinished business, I believe." Loki dove for Bruce's human form, spears extending from his arms, just as the green began to cloud the doctor's eyes. The painful familiar pulses that accompanied the onset of the Hulk coursed through his arteries, expanding his ligature. The signals of his unrestrained monstrous rage. Just before he was pulled under completely, he saw Loki's face split wide into a grin of pure glee, eyes dancing in sick merriment. Fear settled in the pit of Bruce's stomach like leaden ice and he lost consciousness.

 

***

 

Tony was speechless for the first time in years. A horrid tableau: the Avengers dumbfounded into comic stillness, the beheaded national statue, and an unexplainable absence of both Loki and the Hulk. Where had they gone? It was as if they'd been pulled entirely out of existence. There was no thunderous Bifrost impact, no Stephen Strange-type portal. Simply nothing.  Terror shot down Tony's spine as a dozen bewildered eyes met his.

 

 


	3. Chapter 3

 

Darkness. Silence. The absence of sensation cradled him in oblivion. Where was he? When was he? How much time had passed since... whatever came before?

Confusion surrounded him and clouded his brain. It hurt to think. He was himself, but then did that mean... was he trapped in the other guy's mind?

He had nightmares like this. Trapped, unable to act, unable to move, unable to think, unable to escape. His pulse... if that was his pulse?... skyrocketed. Prisoner in his own mind, unable to stop the endless carnage the other guy could wreak. 'Did I hurt anyone?' Was the perpetual question.  The answer could be nothing else than 'yes', continually and unendingly 'yes'.

He strove to gain control of the only thing he could, his own thoughts. Obsessive violent thoughts played over and over. The Hulk, destroying innocent life in an unstoppable rampage. He was powerless to stop it here from his blind, mute, paralyzed coffin. He tried counting seconds just to have control over something. But the images wouldn't cease. Blood on his hands, lifeless bodies on the ground. Gore: splattered, contorted faces, torn flesh, broken bones, fractured lives. Men, women, children. He screamed, voiceless, airless, until his very neurons threatened to explode.

And then, like the dawn, the impenetrable darkness receded. He had eyelids again. He had fingers, which twitched numbly. Toes, which felt as if they were a thousand miles distant. Silence still reigned, but the horrific images slowly faded from his mind. He struggled to find form in the shapeless light growing steadily from dim undefined origins. As feeling coalesced, he felt cold steel under his bare back, legs. The only plus he could deduce so far was that his trousers were still intact from his transformation. Reed Richards was a miracle worker.

The air was chill but not cold. There was no ceiling, no floor. At least not that he could discern from his position. He tried to lift his head, but found to his growing terror that it was encircled, held down by the same cold metal. Metal wrapped around his wrists, ankles, and held him firmly in place. His heart began to race, again. His position was all too familiar, bringing back memories of pain he'd fought dearly to suppress...

"Sssshhhh." A soft hand brushed his brow, a mockery of comfort. Goosebumps raced up his arms. "No need to fret, Doctor Banner. You have all your wishes granted. You are far away from those to seek to hunt you down. You are out of their reach, _entirely_." The last word was said with a chilling finality.  
"And that's supposed to make me feel better?" he quipped nervously, finding his lips had returned, parched words shaking stiffly from his dry throat.  
"Mmmm," his captor murmured softly, continuing to caress his forehead. "Doubtful. After all, you are now wholly at my mercy. And... I intend to show you _none_." His eyes latched onto Loki's mouth, curved into a mockery of a soft, sympathetic smile. Bruce's glasses were gone, but he could see Loki's intentions clearly enough. "No, I intend to show you every intimate horror you've tried to conceal from yourself." Bruce's mind was in disbelief, panic. No other force had dared taunt the Hulk like this, to bring him out by forcefully torturing his weaker human side. Ross was merciless, but with orderly and entirely different goals. Sane goals, by comparison. Chaos incarnate now smiled broadly down on him with sharp teeth and white panic carried Bruce back into unconsciousness.

 

***

 

An eternity of restless night passed behind his closed lids. When he woke, he could not be certain he was truly awake. Nausea permeated his body and his mouth was a dune of dry sand. A cool wet rag was pressed to his forehead, softly wiping away the grime and dirt. His eyelids must have flickered, because he heard a soft murmur in response.  
"Bruce? Bruce, are you awake?" He opened his eyes to dim light shrouding a halo of red curls. Natasha. The rag wiped the corners of his mouth just enough to loosen his tongue.

"Water," he pleaded weakly. She bent, reaching for a cup and held it to his lips, helping him sit up. The most delicious liquid in the world filled his mouth, neither too cold or too warm. "Thank you. What- what are you doing here?"  
"Tony picked up your ID and we stormed Loki's base. He may have had the Hulk, but we had the element of surprise." Her perfect mouth quirked in a small smile. "It's only been a few hours since we got you back to Stark Tower. You really need to rest." He closed his eyes only briefly, in relief. Bruce was afraid of closing them for too long lest this image of sweet serenity dissolve.

"Thank you. _Thank you_ for coming for me." Deep gratitude washed through him.  
"We couldn't leave you to fend for yourself!  No matter how formidable your alter ego is...  We're a team." Her eyes softened, locking with his. "And especially not after we'd-" she paused, shy, the ghost of a blush settling on her perfect cheekbones and forcing her to look away. "Well, after we've just started to get to know each other... you know?" Those fathomless eyes caught his again. Leaden with mystery, now clouded with warmth and a tinge of desire. Natasha. They'd started off on the worst foot possible, the Hulk nearly crushing her tiny body in the chaos of the Helicarrier attack all those years ago. From that rocky point, a tentative partnership followed. Fear turned to respect turned to trust. And friendship. With promises of something more. Bruce's heart sped up, though not dangerously so. Her perfect full red lips were slightly parted, an involuntary reaction. She leaned in and pressed them to his forehead in a slow, soft kiss, communicating her relief at his safety.

If he dared hope... those soft lips bore a promise of more, much more. Warmth and peace pooled in his chest. She stood to leave him to rest and sleep. But as her fingers trailed over his, her body jerked suddenly stiff. Natasha's eyes went impossibly wide and her mouth dropped open in pain. Bruce's pulse sped, fear and confusion on fire through his bare arms where her fingers still rested. Her other hand gripped the center of her chest. A razor-sharp spear pierced her bosom, red blood flooding over her armor and dripping onto the ground.

" _Natasha?! No!_ " Bruce screamed out as her body dropped senseless to the ground. Behind, a grin splitting his face, was Loki. Bruce couldn't think through the panic, adrenaline, anger, and pain.  
Before he could act, the bed and the room faded away into blackness and the cold steel returned, his head once again strapped down like his wrists and ankles. But Loki's grinning face remained, hovering above all.

"Oh, that was _good_ fun. An easy illusion," he rolled his eyes bashfully before they sparked with evil joy, "but with _such_ impressive impact." A low sinister chuckle escaped his lips. "I had no idea you felt so deeply for the Agent Romanov." His nose wrinkled in disgust. "What an unlikely pair. Truly, what could such beauty see in a monster like you?" Bruce's heart had nearly stopped, his brain struggling to cope with the emotional whiplash. Hurled from the care and caresses of a woman he barely dared to desire, to witness her horrific murder, to have the universe pulled out from under him like a cruel rug.

" _You sick bastard!_ I've been here all along, haven't I? Why show me Natasha? _What's the point of all this?!_ " He shouted demands for answers, even from his immobile platform.  
"Doctor Banner, isn't it apparent? You made me suffer, and now I get to return the favor." Loki conjured a short dagger-like instrument, pressing the cold blunt tip against Bruce's bare chest. "Would you like to know what _this_ does? I'm calling it my 'magic wand'. It lets us start our fun. all. over. again." His eyes gleamed wickedly, reflecting the cruel curve of his lips. Raw pain coursed through Bruce's body, along every nerve from the balls of his feet to his ears. He tried to scream, but strobing white pain carried him back into unconsciousness.

 

 

 


	4. Chapter 4

  
Bruce didn't wake so much as realize he was already awake. He was... maybe 20 miles from Times Square? He could see the iconic skyline of New York from his position, sitting in a crater of demolished brick and glass, clutching uselessly over-stretched trousers around his naked body. Post-transformation, he quickly deduced.

The sky overhead was a maelstrom of grey clouds, swirling with unearthly speed. The eye of the alien hurricane was pierced by a steady blue bolt of energy emanating from downtown Manhattan.  The eye grew steadily tighter and smaller as time passed. He _had_ to get down there.  Something wasn't right.  He needed to transform and help the group of heroes he had only tentatively started to call 'friends' in the back of his timid mind.

But then the storm collapsed on itself and like a light switch flipped, the blue energy stopped.  The clouds dissolved and the sky returned to cloudless, cerulean, postcard-perfect summer. Without his glasses, Bruce had to squint to resolve a small grey dot falling from where the center of the maelstrom had been. No, it was plummeting, not flying. It was red and gold now, not grey, as it passed from cloud shadow to sun.

Deep within, Bruce knew it wasn't benign flotsam from the battle, but instead Iron Man falling to his death. Time and gravity were heartless mistresses and Bruce was simply _too far away._ Not Hulk enough when it actually mattered, just plain old helpless Banner. The dot disappeared between the skyscraper fingers of steel and glass and vanished from his foggy vision, clouding swiftly with tears.

 _Why_ was he in this remote location, not close to the action? Had he _fled_ like a  _coward?!_ While Tony, the biggest ego of all of them, had sacrificed himself and died flattened inside his own suit on the concrete..!

An inhuman wail wrenched itself from Bruce's throat, tears blurring the cruel world around him.  He didn't deserve to live while a better man became a martyr. He was so helpless and _weak_ and yet the mercy of death eluded him.

The horror faded behind his screwed shut eyelids and he plummeted, distraught, into unconsciousness.

 

***

 

"I'm learning _more_ about you all the time, my dear fellow."

Sweat dripped across Bruce's forehead as he struggled to gain breath, salty tears stinging his eyes. He cast his eyes sidelong as far as he could with his head strapped down to the metal table. "What a _fascinating_ conundrum you are." Loki's nose was mere inches from his face, his forearm propping his chin in a jocular fashion. His eyes were wide with childish delight. If that child were a pint-sized sadist. "That was _good fun_ , don't you think?" Bruce could only gape and twitch. Was Loki getting off on this?! The doctor's skin crawled and goosepimpled at being observed so closely and clinically.

These weren't memories - they couldn't be.  They were carefully guided nightmares.

As if reading his train of thought, Loki continued.  
"Oh, you give me so much fertile fodder to work with! What shall it be next?" The dark prince winked exaggeratedly at him, totally insane.

Bruce _had_ to stop this now. It would only get worse.  He reasoned that the consequences of unleashing the Hulk were, for once, less catastrophic than refraining.

Bruce reached in the back of his mind and called the Hulk out. It was so easy, he'd done it a hundred times before, both consciously and unconsciously. The anger was always there. And it was only too easy to direct it at Loki now.

But...

But... wait...

He reached inside himself for the Hulk. Nothing was there except an echoing hollow. Bruce had been in such shock from the illusions Loki concocted, he hadn't noticed the absence of his other half. Now he dug furiously at the cement wall of his mind as he tried to unearth the monster inside of him.

Nothing. Just a blank space.  A void.

Oh, god. _Oh holy shit._

Loki was immediately perceptive at the dawning fear spilling from Bruce's eyes.  
"...Something the matter, Dr. Banner? Is there something wrong?" His eyes were bright and wide with feigned concern, wallpapered haphazardly over his sinister delight.

"What have you _done_?" Bruce asked breathlessly. He'd always yearned for the Hulk to disappear, but not _now_ \- Jesus H Christ. Not when he actually needed him!

"I think you'll find this device has innumerable wonderful uses." He gazed with admiration at the shiny surface of the apparatus held between slender fingers. "And _you_ are entirely powerless to stop me from digging into all of your darkest fears. What _shall_ we try next?"

Before the scientist's mind could pull away the cobwebs of terror and respond to the crazed demi-god, Loki jabbed his 'magic wand' into the tender skin between Bruce's ribs. The world lost color and went white once again.

 

***

 

When he next woke, it wasn't in a blanket of confusion or swaddled in soft blankets on the Helicarrier. Instead, he was pulled back to wakefulness mid-scream, his throat raw from hours or perhaps days of begging and wailing. He was strapped horizontally to a metal gurney, arms sliced open in medical precision, blood weeping from precise incisions. Fluids were being pumped into and out of his body through a multitude of IVs. Through his agony and fear, his ears barely registered the cold click of polished boots on tile.  
  
"How is he progressing?"  
"Better than expected, sir. Certainly, better than last time. He's much more stable."  
"That's a good sign. I think we're finally close." Bruce couldn't see anything from his tortured position other than monitoring devices and the evil restraints that cut him open and held him down. His blood was coagulating in dark globules at the edges of his raw split flesh. The voices sounded so familiar, but he was barely lucid through the pain.  
"Is she ready as well?"  
"Nearly so, sir. We'll have to start soon to maximize the probability of success."  
"Alright then, let's get it over with."  
With a stomach churning lurch, his gurney was twirled upright and 180 degrees around so he was now facing his captors.

_Ross!_

Green rage flooded under his skin, begging to escape. Escape and yes - _most definitely, yes_ \- murder this sadistic demon. He wanted to shift, desperately so, but as the last sliver of his lucidity faded, he saw another figure, strapped down and split open in similar fashion across the room. Her dark curls were sodden with tears and blood, covering the top of her face. Her porcelain skin was ashy grey. From the slouched position of her body against her restraints, Bruce could tell she had mercifully succumbed to unconsciousness in order to escape the tortures.

He would recognize her figure anywhere.

On a hundred planets, in a thousand disguises, even after a million years.

Betty.

Her name echoed in his head.  He consciously fought to bring the boiling rage back to a simmer. Bruce clawed internally at the Hulk, begging himself not to transform. She was better off tortured and unconscious than dead. He absolutely could not transform and risk killing his first and deepest love. But how? And why? Her very own _father_ had her strung up like a disfigured puppet. There were no more tears to flow from his eyes. He could not close them to the horror and he was powerless to stop General Ross and his psychotic monkeys from dissecting either of them at their leisure.

"She makes the perfect pair together with our dear friend here, don't you think?" It registered slowly that Ross was speaking to him. "Such a gift we are giving you. A bride for Frankenstein, right? Betty will make a fine _She-Hulk_." He smiled, cold and unfeeling.  The lackey to his left grabbed a long lever and began to push, undoubtedly starting the process that would 'gift' Betty with the same monstrous powers that tormented Bruce without end.

No. No, no, _no, NO!_

Better alive than _dead_ , but better dead than an unstoppable Hulk, driven insane without hope of cure or reprieve. No, _no_!

He would...  Could he?

Yes, oh my god _no_ , but... yes... oh fucking hell...!

The only thing he could do was kill Betty with his own merciful green hands rather than let her succumb to the same fate. He summoned the Hulk in anguish, gritting his teeth, feeling the veins in his neck bulge, letting his despair and rage wash over and transform his own meek frame into a brutal and efficient violence machine.

But it did not come. The Hulk was trapped behind his eyelids, impossibly caught between human and beast. He tried again, pushing and grimacing until the veins popped in his forehead and his sliced-open arms.

Turn! _Turn!!_ Why couldn't he?!

Betty's limp body jerked with the infusion of new fluids and her pale gray skin began to grow ruddy. Her body contorted from a slim innocent feminine figure into a deformed monster. Bruce couldn't look away as his love was destroyed. Her fragile body broke and split gruesomely, giving way to a crimson-skinned bulk of muscle that was uncannily like his own green incubus. Despair curled in his stomach, impotent. He was screaming again.  Even as his lungs begged for air, he couldn't stop screaming.

At long last, throat shredded and mute: the hateful world dimmed around him and went black.

 

***

 

When Bruce regained consciousness again, he prayed to non-existent gods that it had been another illusion. Please, _please_ , let Betty be safe, he pled.

Cold heels clicked on the ground. Ross? As a dark head swum into view, he reasoned it must have been a nightmare. _Thank god._ Loki.

"Enjoyed that, did we?" His smile was a parody of benevolence. His voice a whisper of calm. "You are a treasure trove of horrors, my dear green friend. I'm honestly enjoying this more than I expected." He reached in his pocket for the wicked metal instrument and Bruce reflexively recoiled what little his restraints would allow.

"Please, _no_. Please, I-I know you're out for revenge, but _my god_ \- This is- this is not even ground at all! N-not remotely. We've got to be able to work something out, to work something up t-to make this right. I-I _didn't_ , I-I- _please_ -" Loki cut off his ramblings by grabbing a ball gag.  From where, Bruce would never know.  He stuffed it without preamble in his gibbering, panicked mouth. Bruce's eyes flew wide in terror.  
"You think you can _reason_ your way out of this? Really? How _amusing_." His curious smirk transformed into something much darker. His eyes pierced into Bruce's trembling form. "All you've told me is that I haven't _tortured_ the sanity out of you yet. When I'm through, you'll beg for something as sweet as pain." The wide grin that split his face made a thick bead of terror trickle down Bruce's spine. His eyes were alight with amusement.

"Ready for some more fun?" Bruce's teeth clenched into the gag, trying in vain to talk or beg around it.  To try and reason with a being clearly beyond it. Utterly useless. A sharp stab in his bare thigh felt like it cut down to bone. Bruce was again floating in darkness.

 

 

 

 


	5. Chapter 5

The green was fading from his skin and he was already awake. This was novel, new... had something changed? He'd never been this lucid this soon after transformation.  His focus slowly shifted and he became aware of his surroundings. Chaos was _everywhere_. There was a huge hole in a white brick wall. Tipped over chairs, smashed furniture, chalkboards askew on the remainder of the wall, light fixtures ruptured and vomiting sparks of stray electricity. Backpacks... _flattened_.

His stomach dropped to the soles of his feet. Was this a school? Had he destroyed a school?! What had he become?  This unstoppable monstrosity? He lifted his hands to stare at his shaking fingers, but there was something heavy in them. Something limp. A body.

His breath caught in his throat. The face of the figure was turned away, but a large bloody mess matted brown curls. The figure was so small. A child?

 _Oh my god_ , he had killed a _child_?! How-? _What?!_

His mind spooled into a million threads of thought. Ghastly, cruel hands, monstrous, relentless, had snuffed the life out of something so small.  So precious, innocent, unable to defend itself.

Was this his life, now? Only good for killing and destroying the sweet and pure in the world?!

He set the body down, softly, reverently, as if any gestures or anything he did at this point mattered in the least. How many other bodies were strewn about this school he'd demolished? The world vignetted black at the edges, focusing onto the dead child on the ground before him.

He was _worthless_. He was a beast with one purpose: to kill. He couldn't live with himself, never knowing when he would be sucked under again, driven off in a random direction, cleaving a path of blood and death in his wake.

He ran.

He mindlessly drove his feet into the ground over and over, punishing the pavement.  Driving stones into his bare feet, leaving little trails of oozing blood behind him.

The pain was nothing. His lungs were burning, starved of oxygen.  
The discomfort was nothing. His heart hammered against his ribs.  
_He_ was nothing! Less than nothing!

Bruce ran through vacant evacuated streets until he found himself at the base of a very large hill, gasping for breath. The road in front of him ran upwards in dizzying switchbacks.

He couldn't possibly go on like this and retain his sanity. All his life he'd struggled to do the right thing: for himself, for his colleagues and students, for humanity, for the memory of his mother. Now he was an uncontrollable monster and doing the right thing meant taking himself out of the equation.

Bruce ran. As fast as he could up the hill along the edge of the road. The soles of his feet were raw hamburger now, but it mattered not.

At the top, he looked out over the horizon. The police or the army would be here soon, certainly. They would be responding to his rampage and tracking his half-naked, exhausted self would be child's play for them.

Now. It _had_ to be now.  
There was no option left. No one to mourn him, thank god. No one left to disappoint. No one left whose heart would break. This was for the best. He would remove his variable from the equation of life: it was the only control he had left.

Bruce stared at the distance through the sheer air below him. It wasn't a vertical cliff, but with a running start, he could certainly propel himself out far enough that he'd drop a more than 500 feet before he reached the ground. There was no way he could survive. It was clean, it was sensible, and it was the only option left. He steadied his breath. The only option.

The only option.  
_The only option!_

He chanted it in his head like a mantra, but the tendrils of disgusting self-preservation caressed his brain. Fear.

No! He shoved it away, feeding his mind's eye the image of the dead child in his arms instead. There! That's why!! No more death, no more monster, no more beast!  He screamed in resolve at the top of his lungs, frustration coursing out of him and determination settling in. One good thing to do with his life. End it.  He'd do it - he'd jump! Bruce backed up, took a running start and before the primitive will to live kicked in again, launched himself off the edge of the cliff into thin air. It was exhilarating - _terrifying_! He flipped end over end in a blur of seconds but just before he hit the ground everything went black.

 

***

 

He woke. Tears streamed down the corners of his eyes. The ball gag was still firmly in place, lacing his jaw with pain. That was no fantasy, that was a _memory_. He sobbed quietly.

So, Loki had the ability to pull memories from him as well as painting fictitious tortures? Just wonderful. He closed his eyes, squeezing the last of his tears across his cheeks, into his ears, onto the metal table.

"Suicide?" Loki's voice was low, distant. Bruce opened his eyes but could not see him. "You attempted it?" A pause. "What happened?"

Did... he expect Bruce to answer? This was ludicrous. The doctor's heart clenched tight with sorrow. 

Was the green guy the monster here after all? Loki was doing a damn good job of it himself. Bruce was strung out and his anguish quickly pivoted to anger.  
  
"Mmm hmm mmm hmm mm mmm, mmm mm hmm mm."  
Bruce played at speaking through the gag, feigning the ability to converse.

"Oh all _right_ ," Loki spat, unamused, swimming close into Bruce's field of vision and working to unbuckle the gag. "Answer me, beast." His words were terse. So, Loki didn't like being mocked. Good to know.

"I said: you saw it for yourself. What else do you need me to _explain_?" The doctor's irritated demeanor slithered into his words. Loki was torturing him for no clear reason, and now he wanted to psycho-analyze his suicide attempt?

Bruce was right, the self-styled king didn't like being mocked. Rather than answer, he snarled and thrust a cold, blunt object into Bruce's purpling ribs.  
"Ahhhh!! Jesus- what do you _want_ me to say?!" He took a deep breath. "Why does anyone try to end it? I wake up, I don't know where I am, who or how many I've hurt or killed? It happens over and over again. I'm the _puppet_ and the other guy is the master. I saw no other option. Wouldn't anyone else do the same?"

There was no answer for a long time. Loki was again out of his line of sight, but Bruce could still feel his presence. The doctor firmly refused to be coerced into talking just to fill the awkward dead air, instead choosing to revel in these small moments of relative safety and painlessness between sessions.

"You're an interesting creature, Dr Banner," the demi-god muttered from some distance away, voice flat. "We shall continue our inspiring journey tomorrow." He could hear sharp footfalls on stone, the soft opening of a door-

"Wait!" The sound of a door closing dissolved his hope of release from the restraints. However, a few moments later, his shackles mercifully opened by themselves and melted back into the table. The ache in his neck and back was herculean, and he struggled to sit up with undoubtedly bruised and cracked ribs. There was a feeble diffuse light still coming from above, and he glanced around, taking stock of his prison. It was a bare, circular room of stone with tall walls receding to no apparent ceiling, just light at a distance. The only furniture was the table he was no longer strapped to and a drawerless credenza along one part of the circular wall. There was no door to speak of. Magic, certainly. A room with no ceiling and no door.

Relieved of Loki's presence, Bruce slumped onto the floor against the cold wall, curled into a protective ball, and fell into fitful sleep.


	6. Chapter 6

His hand slipped on the smooth surface of the staff of Gungnir, the friction of his clenched fingers diluted by sweat. As he clung desperately, his feet dangling free below, the crushing weight of defeat and rejection settled on his shoulders. It felt as if the gravity of his failure alone would pull him down and feed him whole to the gaping void below. Above was safety, acceptance, familial love.

It was a farce.

Above Loki, the two men loomed who had nurtured his tender heart for thousands of years.  The men who had fed him mere crumbs of warmth and kindness. But it had been poison all along. He knew deep in his heart for years that he never fit into this family. But he hadn't known _why_ until now. He appealed to them now, his carefully constructed countenance splintering in naked supplication. His judges, above: Odin's stony face cleaving a line between salvation and damnation.

"I could have done it father!" He had, he'd _tried_ , and he'd come so close to succeeding, even if it meant committing genocide against his own people. It was what he'd been trained and conditioned to aspire to from a child: wiping out all of his adopted family's enemies. Even though it meant destroying his own people, his own flesh and blood. These cruel captors had him so twisted, and _yet_ here he was, dangling like a dog, wanting so _so_ badly to please his masters. Waiting for those discarded morsels of love.

"No, Loki." Odin didn't blink as he meted out his punishment in one short syllable.  
No, you could not have done it.  
No, it was a task too great for you.  
No, you pushed too far, committed acts we speak of but dare never do.  
No, you are not worthy.  
No, you are not my son.  
You are not Thor's brother. You are not your mother's son. You are nothing but a disappointment, and this was never your home.

All this was communicated in the swift breath that escaped imperial lips. No.  
This was not his home any longer. He had none. He'd orphaned himself. He had tried to wipe out the planet of his birth. Killed his true father in the process. And now the only home he'd ever known was kicking him soundly out.

What point was all this? _Why try?_  
Why beg for scraps that were held out of reach, given to the golden boy, but never, ever, _ever_ meant for him?

He was so tired. Tired of trying, tired of pretending, tired of sycophantic smiles and a false life with no purpose.  
He was tired of it all. Tired of breathing.

Thor saw it first when Loki's eyes glazed over with despondency, but he was too late.  
Already his sweat-slicked fingers were loosening their grip around the imperial staff.  Already, he had committed to fall. To perish. Thor called after him, but it was fruitless, and far too little, a lifetime too late. A calm settled over Loki as he waited for the void to inexorably devour him and still his foul heartbeat.

 

 

***

 

 

He woke with a jolt, sitting straight up in bed. Black sheets pooled around his waist, dappled with cold sweat. It had been a long time since he'd endured that memory as a nightmare. He had been so low at that point and while he'd wished for the void to tear him to shreds and end his miserable hypocritical existence, it wasn't to be. He drifted senselessly until he went mad. First from boredom, then from delirium, then from anguish, and lastly just to feel anything at all. An eternity.

He fell further and finally into the waiting hands of Thanos. Loki shut his eyes tight before his brain could betray him and feed him images of his own torture on repeat.

The fall. That's what started it. The wish to give up, lay down, opt out, quit the game he couldn't win. Stop his heart from shredding into a million pieces knowing everyone who had loved him from a little boy had been lying to him. He had been a _thing_ to them, a pawn.

He was stronger now, but the echoes of that dark path were still carved in his heart. The parallels with the flashback he'd drawn out of Banner earlier were only too apparent. Tendrils of curiosity towards the other man began to probe through his rib cage, but he swatted them away petulantly. What was there to be curious about? If his enemy were at large, he would explore the impulse in an effort to learn more, build a proper cage and trap his prey.

But it was a pointless effort now, having captured his quarry. All that was left was to extract his revenge from having been publicly humbled, plot stolen, paraded as a spoil of war in front of everyone, his _failure_ written in large, garish letters for the nine realms to jeer.

His jaw clenched in anger. Resolve restored - that was better - he mentally prepared for the day's adventures. Banner had been left in the oubliette all night.  It was only a moment's thought away. Loki wondered, deliciously, how the man had fared the night.

Mortals were so fragile, after all. He spread his pale hands in front of him, conjuring easy energy and forming it into a door.

With a swift gesture, he stood, whisked clothing to his bare form, smoothed his hair and face, and morphed his menacing visage into a regal smile, soft deceptive eyes. He flicked his fingers and the door opened, sending him to the prison where the beast crouched on the floor, head resting against the credenza.  Wary and troubled sleep creased his brow.

_Oh, fun._

Loki evaporated the sole piece of furniture and let Banner's head fall to the stone floor. A sound like a wounded animal escaped his lips and he was stunned into wakefulness.

It was then that the stench invaded Loki's nose. Banner had soiled the room during the night, leaving a deposit of goop on the other side of the room. It appeared to be a mix of feces, urine, and vomit. But that was just a guess, Loki was no expert in mortal excrement, nor did he wish to be.

"You disgust me." He lifted his chin and stared down at Banner, simultaneously wishing away the shameful mess. "You can't _help_ yourself, can you, beast?" Banner was shaking off the ringing in his head, but responded swiftly.

"S-sorry, your _majesty_ , we can't all be as perfect as Asgardians. Even those who attempt to murder their way through whole planets." His tone was dripping with hateful sarcasm. Snarling sharply, Loki took a swift step towards him and Banner reacted without thought, cowering against the wall, behind his raised hands.

"How dare you?! I am a _god_ , you loathful cretin. You are here at _my_ whim and _my_ mercy, so I would caution you not to test it," he sneered. Banner emboldened slightly at these words. He wasn't one to be beaten that easily.

"Your _mercy_? Yesterday, if that's what it was, you said you intended to show me none? So what do I have to lose by baiting you?"  
" _Silence!_ " Loki seethed. Why was this impertinent creature recklessly set on his own destruction?  
"I bet your shit doesn't stink, does it, your highness? I bet you've always been coddled and spoiled. If anything, _you_ disgust _me_."

Loki saw red. He clenched his own hands like hawks' claws and let the furious energy pool into his chest. Banner's body was lifted with a mere thought, and he gasped at the sudden turn of events. Loki dropped the good doctor onto the metal table unceremoniously and restraints flew out of the surface and secured him tight.

" _Coddled? Spoiled?_ I should pull your tongue from your mouth." He spat each word slowly, for impact. Loki smirked evilly, eyes sparkling and noticed with glee that the pulse in Banner's jugular sped noticeably and his pupils constricted. "But then, I wouldn't be able to thoroughly enjoy your _delicious_ screams." Loki produced the featureless wand from thin air. He was giving himself a real treat today, showing Banner a little more of his craft than he had intended.  But it was so worth it.  Revealing a little of his true power to garb himself in the delight of the mortal's fearful response.

"Nighty-night, monster." He slammed the dull end onto Banner's forehead forcefully and watched as his eyes rolled back in his head.  Banner's body spasmed into unconsciousness under its control.

This time, Loki would let Banner's psyche take the lead.

 

  
***

 

  
His eyes were half open, asleep on the couch. He felt so small, and indeed he was.  His toes brushed against the arm of the sofa, his soft dark curls cradled in the lap of... his mother? The walls of the darkened room flickered in tones of blue and orange. The TV was on, muted. It was late at night. Her lap was so warm and he couldn't help but inhale her smell: safe, warm, a hint of hairspray, oatmeal, and the faint flavor of cigarettes. He hated that she smoked them, but the complex smell was written into his subconscious as the fragrance of his first, deepest love. All these thoughts swam in his brain, thinking and remembering like an adult, but embodied in his childhood frame. He must have been moving just a little too much, because her fingers threaded through his hair and she chuckled soft and low.

"Are you awake, Brucie?" He shook his head no, playfully, and she chuckled tenderly in response. "You should get to bed, sweetie. It's late."

In the deep recesses of memory, he agreed with her. It was never a good idea to be awake late, but he couldn't remember why. Bruce rubbed his sleepy eyes and sat up, collecting his thoughts for a moment but having no trouble remembering where his childhood room was. Before he could stand, the front screen door opened and slammed. He felt his mother tense and gasp quietly.

Brian Banner stumbled into the room, car keys hanging loosely from his hands. They shook.

The man slowly digested the scene, piecing it into his head like a jumbled puzzle.  
Bruce had seen this before. His father was drunk. His mother stayed as silent as the TV, not moving, not breathing. It was if a careful spell had been cast on the room, trying desperately to keep the moment intact.

Brian's eyes fell on Bruce, and the spell shattered.

"Why aren't you in bed, boy?" Bruce was silent. There was no answer that would be right. "Speak when you're spoken to!"  
"Yes, sir. I'm going to bed." He jumped to his feet and jogged quickly to his room, but his father's longer legs took in the distance and grabbed him by the collar.  
"I've told you: again and again, but you just don't listen. You _ungrateful_ little whelp." It was a nonsense argument. In his agitated haze however, he needed none.

The car keys were tossed towards the coffee table, crashing into the wall instead with Brian's force. One handed, he started to unbuckle his belt. Bruce knew exactly what was coming, and he threw his hands in front of his face. His father dropped him on the floor and doubled the belt in his hands.

"Brian, stop!" His mother jumped to her feet and Bruce felt a tiny surge of hope. Too late. The leather landed across his shoulders with the full force of his father's arm. He couldn't help but cry out. " _Stop it!_ I kept him up, it's not his fault!" From his position on the floor, Bruce heard a sharp slap and a gasp.  
He turned, seeing a drop of blood pool in the corner of his mother's mouth.  
"Don't you defend him. He's all your fault, anyway. Stupid whore." Brian reached for her blouse and slapped her again. This time, she emitted a small whimper, but was otherwise stoic.

"Mom!" Bruce couldn't help but intervene, even knowing it was against his instincts of self-preservation. He received a fist, all knuckles, across the top of his head and fell hard on the floor. He could only watch helplessly as his father turned and continued to beat his mother. After what seemed like an eternity watching through eyes filled with tears, the blows falling again and again until she was still and unresistant, his father stood over the sodden, bruised mess of his mother.  
"You're lucky I'm too drunk tonight to do more." He threw the belt to one side. "Dumb bitch. Keep your son in check and I won't have to teach you both a lesson." He shuffled off, keeping one foot barely in front of another. "I'm going to bed." The bedroom door slammed and shook as he failed to close it before falling unconscious onto the bed.

His mother sat up, shaking. Tears coursed down both of their faces. "I'm sorry," she mouthed wordlessly, and held her arms out to Bruce. He crawled over, and collapsed into her lap. "It will get better sweetie, I promise." Her words were soft, near soundless, whispered into his ear. He wanted to believe them,  _desperately_ , but knew it could only get worse before it got better. Bruce cried himself to sleep in her embrace.

 

 

***

 

 

He awoke again, tears flowing from his eyes for the third time in Loki's presence. His heart was split open, raw.  
  
"Got what you came for, _didn't_ you?" He spat spitefully, ignoring the tears that ran down his face. Loki was nowhere in sight, but Bruce could feel him lurking beyond his vision.  
The sound of footfalls ghosted slowly across the stones from one side of his head to another.  
Loki was pacing.  
From the left... to the right...  
And back...  
Silent.

"Why don't you just get it over with and slice me open like you'd like to? Why not just break my bones? _Come on_ , I'm not in a position to put up any fight!"  
Bruce's words fell on deaf ears. In between the pacing, he could hear Loki muttering to himself.

"...Any dumb beast is capable of love for its mother. Mortals are not special. Rats. Dogs. Bilgesnipe. Donkeys."  
He rushed into Bruce's field of vision in one quick leap, magic enhancing his speed. Bruce gasped in sheer surprise. " _You are not special! You are just an animal_ ," he spat. "But: lucky for you, I've found a _new_ way to torture you." He grabbed Bruce's lower jaw in one hand and pulled his locked teeth apart, shoving the device inside and making him taste steel and bile as it hit the back of his throat and made him gag. Loki's pupils dilated in pleasure at his own violence. "This next one's on me. _Enjoy_."

And the world went white again.

 

 


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Short chapter, but lots more content to come. Hang in there, dear reader.  
> There's a bit more Bruce-abuse to endure first...

It was a hot day, sun overhead at its maximum peak in the spotless blue Ohio sky.  Bruce's small body was filled with anxiety and nervousness. He was standing in the driveway with his mother, who was stricken with a sense of urgency.  
  
" _Hurry_ up, Bruce. I love you, but just _pick_ one and we can be on our way." Two toys were on the concrete in front of him: his erector set and his ham radio. If his mother was making him leave the only home he ever knew, why couldn't he take both?

"Why can't I take both?" he asked, in a small petulant voice. His mother sighed, hands on her hips.  
"We don't have room in the car, Bruce. It's full. Just pick one and I'll buy you another someday, I _promise_. But we _have_ to go, _now_." Rationally, he knew this decision really didn't matter and he was being a selfish child, but he was a child after all, and he couldn't help his stubbornness and indecision. Then he heard his mother gasp. "Oh god." She grabbed him roughly by the shoulders and pushed him into the front passenger seat of the hot car. He buckled up automatically and looked back as she shut his door. His father was pulling into the driveway behind them.

Suddenly the decision between toys became utterly meaningless.

"Betrayed at the very last. You _wicked_ bitch." His father slammed his own car door aggressively behind him. "I leave for a job interview to support your lazy, entitled ass _and_ that worthless leech, and you try to run on me?!"  
"I've had it, Brian! I've _absolutely_ had it. This is not a marriage, it's a prison! Can't you see what you're doing to your son-" he backhanded her and sent her reeling.  
"My son? _My_ son?! You tricked me, you deceitful bitch. I never wanted him, I only wanted _you_. You _make_ me do this, you know, Rebecca?"

He stopped just long enough to grab her by the hair. Bruce unbuckled his seat belt and was out of the car in two seconds. He didn't know what he could do but he had to do something.  This was different than before, somehow. This was worse. He was young but he knew it instinctively. Through all the fights, all the black eyes his mother endured, all the bruises he'd weathered on his small body.

This was in broad daylight. His father was no longer hiding his rage.  
The toys were forgotten, the meaningless decision forgotten. Their window of escape had closed.  
His own indecision had closed it for them.

"Kick me while I'm down, _right?!_ You always knew how to _sink your claws_ into me."  
Hand still gripping her hair, Brian punched her with the other hand, and then loosened his grip in disgust.

It was all in slow motion. Bruce was too far away. Her head twisted in one direction from the impact of his knuckles, and she lost her footing, pivoting on one delicate toe. He watched as her hair spun about her, rotating like a ballerina in mid-air at a 45 degree angle with the ground. There was nothing he could do.

Her hands couldn't stretch out in time to break her fall. Her head did instead.

A sick wet slap and reality rushed up to full speed. In Bruce's peripheral vision, his father took two steps back, becoming suddenly aware of the impact of his actions. But Bruce could only concentrate on his mother, on her unfocused gaze and her slack lips that tried to mouth something to him. It was his own name. Vivid blood wet her hair and pooled on the driveway, rolling slowly down to the street.  
There was nothing he could do.

He watched her take her last breath and all emotion and thought drained from his small body.

There was nothing he could do.

 

***

 

Tears were the first thing he recognized. He knew he was back in the torture chamber before his eyelids opened. He had shed so many in the last two days.

If Loki intended to kill him by dehydration, then he was well on his way to being successful. The hair at Bruce's temples was wet from weeping.

The dark god's voice wafted into his ears, quiet, far away.  
"...Any beast is capable of love for its mother. You're not special." He was pacing again.

The silence was pregnant with the potential for violence. His captor's face thrust into his vision, inches from his own.  
" _You're not special!_ "  
Words spit with rage, half sneer, half scream. Bruce clenched his eyes shut as if they would keep the sound from his ears. When he opened them tentatively, Loki was still there, eyes piercing, unblinking.

It was an interaction beyond strange. Loki's enraged visage hung just above his, neck veins taut, spittle on his lips threatening to fall on Bruce's face. It was probably the clearest Bruce had ever seen his face, due to proximity and his poor vision. It was unnerving to say the least. Neither man spoke, staring at each other in an intense moment, Loki with anger and impotent frustration, Bruce with apprehensive confusion borne from bone-deep sorrow.

Loki was the first to break away, disappearing again from Bruce's field of view. His voice was now distant, apathetic.  
"We're done for today, you _pathetic_ dreg. If I find you've soiled this room when I return, I will beat you until you forget your own name."  
  
A door slid open and closed somewhere.  And as before, the restraints holding Bruce down clicked open and shrank back into the table. Bruce's tortured body slid off the plinth to the floor and he sobbed soundlessly.

 

 

 


	8. Chapter 8

This wasn't supposed to be happening.

His long fingers hovered carefully over the rune he'd drawn on the alabaster plinth. Both the slab and the rune were circular in nature. The glyphs shimmered, drawn with powdered palladium into a spiral mandala. The stately order of the silver lines and the white surface were flecked chaotically with his own blood.

This was old magic and required the blood of one shapeshifter to restrain the abilities of another. Yes, the rune was doing its job, and quite well. If not, the green monster would have erupted long ago. Most certainly after that last episode.

No, it wasn't the rune that was letting him down. It was that worthless stick! Loki turned his anger on the wand.

He should have known it wouldn't be without side-effect. Loki produced the silver device from one of his many spatially-phased pockets and glared at its inert surface.

 _Feckless_ elves! He was feeling _everything_ Banner was experiencing.  
  
It was a delightful and unexpected benefit at first, allowing him to gorge himself on the pain and confusion he was producing in his quarry firsthand. It was so pure, so _satisfying_! He was enamored with the idea of a good, thorough revenge.  But this was becoming something different.

When Loki's magic entwined with the Morphesean Ingot and he'd managed to instantly incapacitate Banner on Liberty Island, he was beyond pleased. It was child's play in the next instant to devil him away to his inter-dimensional fortress.

After the first dream had produced such grief and impotent anger within his prey, Loki couldn't help but be a little turned on at himself and his own competence...  
  
Bor's Beard, all things considered, he was an amazing creature. A force to be reckoned with. Yes, he had setbacks in the past. Success wasn't achieved through brute force alone.  No, it was established through strategy and timing.   
  
He really must stop attacking issues head on, and use a little stealth-craft instead, Loki mused to himself. After all, he was _The_ Trickster: the god of lies and chaos, not the god of leading armies from the fore and charging into the breach blindly.

Useless. He was smarter than that. His gifts were more apt at subtle feats.  Propping up a puppet doomed to fail, sweeping in after the blood and lives and hard work had been spent, drinking in the glory and victory from his vanquished foes at the end.

 _Norns_ , success made him heady. And hard. He had been tempted to give in to base impulses and pleasure himself after the initial triumph with Banner, but he refrained. Naturally, he was a god and he would indulge in the pleasures of conquering, not of the flesh.

After a few rounds of unmitigated victory however, Banner's dreamscapes started to eat at Loki. A suicide attempt by the green beast? Wholly unexpected. Being beaten and abused as a child by his father? _Impossible_. How could he have predicted this? And then, the murder of his mother, due in part to his own action?  
  
It defied logic.

Loki really should have done his homework on Banner first.

But he hadn't, and now the sights, sounds, emotions were all unburied and all too real. And Loki had relived them right along with the good doctor. It hit close to home.  Far, far, _far_ too close.

He'd...  
He'd failed, let go, given up, and plunged into the Void.  
He'd been blatantly lied to. An elaborate conspiracy.  
He'd never live up to his father's expectations.  
He'd led the murderer directly to his mother's chambers.

Both he and Banner had indirectly committed matricide, and now both men were cursed to live with the aftermath of their actions. Bearing his own grief was enough, but now he had the doctor's fresh guilt to wrestle in tandem.

Loki paced in his chambers, hands clasped behind his back to keep them from throwing something at the wall. _This wasn't supposed to happen!_ How _could_ it have happened?!

No, the mortal's pain could not compare to Loki's.  Not by a long shot.  He was a fool to entertain these thoughts at all. His teeth ground together, anger at his own weakness radiating out of every pore. Banner was a mindless beast, a token to be played with, to be vivisected at will. To cry, and wail, and languish deliciously until _he alone_ chose to crush the life from his frail mortal body. He wasn't supposed to _sympathize_ with his foe!

All other options were unsatisfactory. So instead, Loki took his internalized rage and directed it at the only safe place: Banner.

 

***

 

Robbed of the credenza, Bruce was curled up instead against the torture table. It was offensive to cuddle up for support to the object indirectly responsible for causing your own pain. Like caressing a live wire. Bruce mused... maybe it was the beginnings of Stockholm Syndrome? Thank goodness it was at least directed at an inanimate object and not at Loki.

Additionally, he was wet and uncomfortable, having lost another shred of his dignity and soiling himself and his lingering garments after Loki had threatened him against using a portion of the room for his toilet. But in the end, he was only human. He eventually lost control of his bladder and colon. And now he was paying for it, sitting in a damp pile of his own filth.

Correction...  _Now_ he would be paying for it.

The non-existent door slid open and Loki, in full battle regalia, stalked into the room. He stopped a foot away from Bruce's huddled form, nose arching aristocratically into the air, eyebrow raised in disgust beneath his golden horned helm. If he was going for intimidating, it was certainly working.

"What. Did. I. Tell. You?" He waited for an answer, but Bruce knew from past experience there was no answer that would satisfy someone like Loki. The Asgardian slowly licked his top lip. "I think you do this on _purpose_ to incite me. Or perhaps not. Perhaps you have no control over yourself. You _are_ just an animal, after all." He spat the words with contempt and nudged Bruce viciously, with the pointed toe of his boot. "No words? Don't tempt me to remove your idle tongue after all." Bruce sighed raggedly, pinching the bridge of his nose were his glasses would normally sit. There wasn't any way to win this or stop what Loki had planned.

"I'm only human, Loki. I can't stop my bodily functions. You're some type of god, but I bet you still need to breathe, right?" Bruce fixed his gaze firmly on the floor. One little bit of exhausted defiance was still coloring his voice, but he wasn't foolhardy enough to look the demi-god in the eyes.

There was no reaction from Loki, so he unwisely continued. "I _am_ human, remember? That means I urinate, and I shit, and sometimes I vomit. I'm sorry. But it also means I need to eat and drink and since it's been nearly two full days, you should know I'm probably going to die of dehydration sooner or later. That will end your fun once and for all, _won't it?_ " The sarcasm in his voice was now apparent.

Foolish mortal.

"You're exactly right." Loki's voice was so deadpan, it made Bruce lock eyes with him.

Mistake. There was no pity or deference there.   
"I shall have to have you bathed and fed then, won't that be nice?" His face arched into a plastic pitiless mockery of a smile. He snapped his long fingers and the room around them disappeared, to be replaced by a bright and burning hot desert that stretched limitlessly in all directions. Bruce shut his eyes in reflex, his pupils taking an eternity to adjust to the blistering light. He squinted hard but couldn't make out anything other than a tall figure standing dark on one side, which he reasoned must be Loki.

"This is something you mortals call a 'hose', correct?" he mocked. Trepidation and confusion ran over Bruce's skin in goosebumps despite the heat. "Enjoy." With little warning, an ice cold blast of water hard as a baseball bat slammed into Bruce's crouched body. He gasped and gagged on the water, trying to block it with his hands without success. He could hear Loki laughing over the onslaught. "You wanted to bathe? Bathe _now_ , you stupid creature!"

And Bruce did his best, the water beating at his bare skin. But he was fairly useless at it, like trying to wash a car with a sandblaster. His flesh goosepimpled and wrinkled, turning pink under the abuse. Eventually he gave up and sat with his back to Loki, shoulders taking the brunt of the abuse. The water ended.

"Tsk. You're no fun. I hardly even enjoyed that." Loki sighed long-sufferingly. "Well, don't just sit there. Let's have you fed and your thirst slaked so we can start anew."

Loki must have snapped his fingers again, but Bruce couldn't possibly capture these small nuances after such treatment. The environment changed again, and a cool breeze hit his body. He heard... birdsong? He turned around from his seated position, confused. A grand table was laid out in a room that to Bruce, was reminiscent of an Italian portico.  It overlooked an expansive, verdant plain dappled lightly as the sun peeked through the clouds.

"I can see you're confused," mused Loki happily, already seated, crossing one leg elegantly over the other, wafting a napkin to his lap. "Honestly? I thought adding kindness to cruelty would be so much more _fun_ in the end." Bruce was stunned, wordless.

Yeah, for sure he'd have a giant case of Stockholm Syndrome soon. Loki cleared his throat impatiently, one eyebrow arched judgementally.   
"Well? If this isn't up to your expectations, then I could easily return to my first plan, which was to lock your jaws open with a retractor and force feed you by tube."

"No-no, this is- this is fine." Bruce was quick to answer. He stumbled ungracefully to his feet and sat opposite to Loki on the farthest chair possible.  
  
The quantity of food was nigh unreasonable, but he wasn't going to complain. There were bowls of fruits, most of which he'd never seen before. A plate of rolls, stacked high. Myriad meats and casks of water and wine intermingled with what appeared to be delicate pastries and cakes. It was a feast unlike anything he'd ever witnessed, even at Stark Tower.

Bruce forced himself to eat and drink slowly after having been without water or food for nearly two days. He wanted to gorge, but fought back the instinct, knowing clinically he'd stand a better chance of keeping the nourishment down this way. Loki inspected his habits closely over the rim of a goblet of wine.

"I notice you haven't touched any of the meat dishes. Why _?_ " He asked bluntly.  
"I um... well, there's a dietary preference on Earth called vegetarianism. I'm vegetarian, so I don't eat meat." Bruce stated as timidly and simply as he could. Loki's brow furrowed.  
"Why not? Or don't humans need protein to survive? This is rather enlightening and useful knowledge."  
"No, no, it's not that. There's protein in plants, too. I just - I don't believe in eating other living creatures." Bruce's brain did a double-take. What was happening here? Was he having an intelligent conversation with this madman?  
  
"Why exactly? Is it a misplaced fear of divine retribution?  Or a taboo driven from the interaction between sex and death? Or is it a childish sympathy mistakenly transposed from your offspring to infant animals?"  
"Um, well _maybe_? But in my case I feel like I cause enough death and destruction on my own. I don't need to contribute to the industrial farming conglomerates that dole out merciless cruelty to those without a voice for the sake of cheap nutrition and a quick buck." He looked up timidly, realizing that he'd let that all out in one quick breath.

Loki stared at him blankly for half a moment before tossing his head back and laughing. He cackled so long and loud that soon he was breathless and wiping tears from his eyes.

"What?" asked Bruce, indignantly.  
"Oh, my. That was _hilarious_. You really have some deep-seated restraints and inhibitions we need to explore." His green eyes were alight, smile genuine, if insane. It was charming and terrifying simultaneously. "I _can't wait_ to get started." He glanced critically at Bruce's plate, now nearly empty. "Finished? Yes? No? Too bad."

So much for intelligent conversation. Bruce chided himself and braced for the now somewhat-familiar spatial displacement. They were back in the torture room before he could blink.

"Get on the table," Loki ordered.  
"Willingly?" Bruce was affronted. "I don't think so." Loki smirked in delight.  
"I was so _hoping_ you'd fight me on it." Loki pulled with both hands at an invisible thread in mid-air and slowly energy condensed. Bruce could feel something around his ankles tightening. Before he could look down to inspect, his feet were whisked out from beneath him and he was hoisted overhead, dangling from his feet.  
  
"What the hell?!" he spattered as he found his breath again.  
"Hmmm... 'Merciless cruelty to those without a voice?' You should stop giving me ideas, Doctor Banner." Loki reprimanded him playfully, one finger wagging back and forth slowly in the air in admonition. Gradually, Bruce began to sway from side to side as well, pulled by the movements of Loki's finger. "There's more than one way to knock you out so we can play." Like a pendulum in reverse, Bruce's body slowly sped up and his arms and head got ever closer to the stone sides of the room. All the blood rushed to his head and his eyes widened as he understood what Loki meant to do. Had he'd gotten the idea from Bruce's awful memories, or from the way the Hulk had made Loki submit once upon a time? It hardly mattered.

Soon enough, his hair was brushing the walls. Then his head was tapping them. Then, the pain started. Loki threw him back and forth, concussing his head against the unforgiving stone, harder each time, splitting his skin. Bruce screamed. Two more impacts, and he was knocked out cold.

 

 

 ***

 


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for making it this far, dear readers! As difficult as these most recent two chapters are to read, they were just as difficult to write, re-write, edit, and post.  
> I promise the damage train is almost at an end. For now. ;)

He was in a waiting room. His feet were crammed in tennis shoes too small for his large feet and the tips of his toes were painfully pinched. The scuffed white floor matched the scuffed white walls and a questionable smell of cleaning solution abused his nostrils. The audible tick of a clock and the hard plastic of the chair only added to his discomfort. He'd been here for an eternity, and yet he'd happily stay in this purgatory than deal with the inevitable end of the wait.

"Mr Banner?" A stocky orderly called, all too soon. Bruce raised his head from where he'd cradled it between his hands, trying in vain to melt into the floor.  
"Yes?"  
"We have your father ready now."

Bruce signed the papers they'd placed in front of him in robotic fashion. It didn't matter what they said. It only mattered what they did, which was release his father into his care. Could 15 years of separation and rehabilitation have an impact? Bruce was young, but not naive. He hoped, but did not trust that everything the institute staff said was true. That his father was indeed ready to come home.

Over the next few months, Bruce's trepidation proved to be right. His father returned to drinking and bouts of instability. Bruce spent as much time as he could away from their apartment, buried in his work, study, research, anything he could. He left early in the morning and came home late at night. He found occupation for his free time on the weekends. But it wasn't enough.

Every time he saw his father, he saw the man who'd pushed his mother to the edge: to a broken shell of a woman, desperate, finally leaving him.  Her fragile body shattered on the pavement where her life slipped away.

He couldn't forgive him. And it didn't appear Brian wanted to be forgiven, judging from his frequent insults and bouts of rage directed at the son he never wanted in the first place.

It all came to a head when the summer heat slunk in and the window AC unit went out. Even now in his flashback, Bruce couldn't remember how the fight started. But he remembered how it ended. Brian grabbed the empty bottle of brandy from the table and threw it at Bruce's head. It splintered into a thousand pieces against the wall. Bruce snapped, grabbed the toaster and retaliated, hurling it at his father with force. It only made the older man chuckle.

"See? You _are_ just like me. Just as I feared! I should have _smothered_ you in your sleep when you were a baby. It would have been simpler. You're a monster just like me. You're doomed, just like me! She tricked me and now I'm saddled with you."  
"Get out! Get _out!_ You worthless, _hateful_ old man!" Bruce turned to grab another kitchen appliance, but Brian had slunk to the door and escaped.

Without an outlet to expend his boiling anger, Bruce escaped a few minutes later, wandering the streets. The humidity was thick in the air. As luck would have it, it was the anniversary of his mother's death. So many years ago, but the wounds felt as fresh and raw as ever. Her absence a gaping wound in his ribcage.

It was inevitable that his dark musings would carry his feet subconsciously to a florist, and then onwards to her grave. As he reached the cemetery, a light breeze began to curl through the stagnant air. The sky darkened, but it only matched Bruce's mood. Rain would be welcome. He hoped deep inside that it would wash away all his failings and sins.

What he found at the grave site was completely unexpected. His father had wandered there as well. Brian was swaying back and forth over the grave site, drunkenly. He was- what the hell? He was _pissing on her headstone?!_ The last shred of Bruce's sanity broke and all of his repressed rage came spilling out. He dropped the bouquet and grabbed Brian by the shoulders, spinning him around and screaming in his face.

"I'm the monster? _I am?!_ You sick _fuck_. I lied for you! I dragged my conscience through the mud for you! I _sat on my hands_ in that courtroom! She was an angel and _she loved me_ despite you." He shook his drunken father like a ragdoll, fury radiating out of his hands. "I took away her only chance for justice. All for you! If I'm a monster, then I'm one that _you_ created!"

"Yeah- You're a chip off the old block, that's for sure. You are _cursed_ to go through life alone, hated, _despised_. Aren't you glad to be born into this family?" He reared back as much as their proximity would allow. And spit directly in his son's face.

Bruce landed the first punch, and Jesus it felt good. To watch the face of he and his mother's abuser twist sideways from the impact. Bruce was finally grown: big enough at last to stand up to him. The two men fought with deadly intent. They clawed at each other's hair, clothes, trying to land the best hit. His father had experience, crushing his fist into Bruce's undefended gut. But Bruce had unbridled rage flowing through his veins. They traded vicious jabs and punches, but Brian was decades Bruce's senior and it wasn't long before the younger Banner had the upper hand. Without thought, he grabbed his father's hair and crushed his face against the first flat surface he could find: his mother's headstone.

His vision went red and he didn't stop smashing until the body under his hands stopped struggling and went limp. He dropped his father on the ground in a pile of limbs. Bruce was out of breath and staggering, numb. It was half a minute before his actions sank in. His father still wasn't moving. Bruce's breath caught in his chest and he turned the other man over gingerly, afraid to see what he'd done.

Brian's head was a deluge of blood, the firm tissue of his nose embedded in his brain, his face raw and skinless and definitely dead. Blood was everywhere. On Bruce's hands, on his mother's grave, dripping down the half-true words 'beloved mother and wife' and onto the bright green grass. _Holy fucking god._ What had he done?

The heavens opened and rain began to pour. His brain shut down. Bruce stood over the body of his father for a long moment and watched as the rain slowly turned the blood pink and then washed it away, making everything clean again. He was soaked to the bone and he didn't care. The rain smoothed everything out. But it couldn't remove the body or take away what he'd done. As the rain relented, Bruce turned and ran without direction. Wherever his feet would take him.

 

***

 

He awoke on the ground: his face cradled by cold stone, his feet tied together, his head a mass of pain. Bruce couldn't see him, but he could hear Loki pacing again. The only sound in the otherwise silent room. He swallowed slowly, thickly. Loki's pacing wasn't a good thing. It couldn't be. It certainly hadn't been before. Nothing the demi-god ever did yielded something positive for Bruce. The pacing finally slowed.

 _"I can't take it!"_ Loki shrieked, splitting the air. "If this is some _game_ you're playing, I've had enough!" Bruce was stunned into confused silence. Was Loki speaking to him? He tried to turn too quickly and his vision waved and bobbed. Yep, that was a concussion for sure. He took a deep breath, forcing the bile back down, and turned more slowly.

"You! How are you _doing_ this?" He pointed an accusing finger at Bruce, who was splayed out on the floor.  
"D-doing what?"  
"The suicide attempt, then your mother, _now your father?!"_ He growled furiously. "I don't believe any of it." He resumed pacing. "But you're no sorcerer, you're just a mindless beast!"    
"Loki..." He blinked, trying to make the out-of-focus images in front of his eyes at least stop shaking. "I think I'm going to die. Either from exposure, a concussion, or... eventual infection by... space bacteria? So... while I would love to indulge you, I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about."

Loki snarled wordlessly and continued pacing, refusing to look at Bruce.  
  
_"You,"_ was all he could answer for the longest time. Eventually Bruce gave up and used his arms to pull himself over to the table, laying on the floor and leaning against it for support.  
"You," he spit again and finally continued, "you've gotten into my _head_ and my _memories_ and I don't know how you've _done it_. That's the only explanation." Bruce blinked again, slowly, trying to focus the world that had clearly turned inside out. He began speaking to Loki like you would a small child or feral animal.  
"Okay, that's reasonable... But I don't know how I would get in your head or your memories. I'm not capable of that." Bruce held his hands up, palms out in supplication.

Loki had to admit, Banner really did look miserable and frail there on the ground, hair matted with blood, pallid and weak from torture, lack of sleep and food. The Trickster fell silent again, as he tried to apply a salve of logic over his panic. His face betrayed his emotions, eyes wide: he'd said too much. Far too much.  A mere mortal could not have played this trickery off against him. Him?! Really?! One of the most powerful magic users in the cosmos. The whole idea was laughable. So now he had to come up with a way out of this compromising situation.

Don't panic. He was the god of lies, after all. He would come up with something...

But as he paced, the most straightforward way that occurred to him was to simply kill Bruce Banner.

He turned away from Bruce and conjured an ivory spear half his height. With the rune in place, it would be easy. Banner couldn't shift into his green incubus, he would just bleed out on the floor, frail and human.  And then Loki would have one less trouble to worry over.  He smoothed over his lingering hesitation with fractured logic.  Isn't that how it was always going to end?

"Loki?" Bruce murmured hesitatingly. "Is everything alright?"  The words were barely out of his throat when the demi god spun, pouncing on him and placing the tip of the razor sharp spear against his rib cage. He could kill him without blinking an eye. It was too easy.

"Everything is _far_ from alright. I brought you here for revenge, to slowly torture you into gibbering insanity, to pay you back for _humiliating_ me and foiling my crusade." His jaw was set, eyes bleeding fury. He pushed down the tiniest amount on the spear, as lightly as you would cradle a bird. It pierced the top layer of Bruce's skin and blood began to ooze from his chest. Bruce gasped in pain.

"But instead, as we walk through your memories, I find I am _forced_ to walk through _mine_." He grimaced, lines drawing his face into an etching of pain.  Each word was drawn from between his lips with a slow, deliberate, dramatic pace. "They are not events I wish to revisit." Through the pang on his own chest, Bruce could still see the immense effort it took for Loki to now plaster over his loss of composure, forcing a thinly-lipped sardonic smile through his rage. "But it matters nothing now, since you will be dead in a minute."

"Loki, please," Bruce begged. There was little else he could do. It fell on deaf ears. Loki's face fell again, the energy to maintain his mask visibly dissolving.  
"Your suicide attempt?" he elaborated.  "It froths to the surface and I am forced to remember mine in _humiliating detail_. Your mother dies by your action? I remember the same, and the last time I laid eyes on her _it was only in anger!_ Your father lied to you, hated you, cast you out, and now his death is on your hands. And I am forced to remember _the same_ a thousand times over!" Loki was shaking now, his eyes red, but yet strong enough to keep tears at bay in front of his enemy. "Whether you did this through magic or deception or whether the Ingot is cursed, I care not. You will never speak of this to another soul because I will _crush_ you now like the _insect_ you are!" Bruce's eyes widened in fear and Loki pushed the spear between his ribs, the blade sinking deep. As the tip began to pierce the edge of Bruce's heart, Loki saw the second most terrifying thing he'd witnessed in his fantastically long life.

Bruce's wide eyes turned green.

The monster took over.

And he shared his fear and pain with Loki quite literally.

 

 


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Still there, folks? Here's where the dynamic shifts.  
> Comments and criticism, bring it on.

 

Darkness. Silence. The absence of sensation cradled him in oblivion. Where was he? When was he? How much time had passed since... whatever came before? It hurt to think. Time was nothing but a endless undulating sea of misery. And then, the pain miraculously increased. A searchlight beacon of light pierced over the dark waters and drilled into his brain.

But he found it did not shine from the horizon, it shone from above. He was flat on his back in the oubliette and with each beat of his heart, pain beat time on his body like a monstrous drum. He tried to touch his head with his hand, but something strong bound his wrists together. His heart began to quicken, increasing his agony alike.

"You're awake. Good." A disembodied voice drifted from somewhere above. "Do you remember what happened?" Loki winced and tried to think through the pain. The voice was so familiar.

"Who are you? Why do you keep me in chains?" He demanded, but with the pain he was in, his commanding voice was fairly feeble.

"Loki, it's Bruce." A head swam into his vision, blocking the unmerciful light from above. "We're still in your 'fun-house'. How do we get out?"

Bruce. Banner. The thing. Everything came rushing back to him and he laid his head back on the ground, utterly defeated. How in the nine realms had the good doctor transformed? It defied logic. The rune was perfect, it had held him successfully from shifting until that point. The palladium glyphs were in place, the blood...

Oh _Norns_. The blood must have dried and flaked away after so much time had passed.  Loki closed his eyes and cursed himself. He was distracted by his victory, his fun.  Later, his internal agony.  And he'd made a stupid, backbreaking mistake because he'd pushed the boundaries too far. When would he learn? Banner's head retreated and Loki remained prone in the center of the floor, the feeble light shining like a strobe from above, piercing his headache. The other man was out of his sight but doubtless near the wall.  As far away from Loki as he could possibly get.

"I'm not letting you loose, that much's for sure." After a few unsuccessful tugs at his bonds, Loki knew in the pit of his stomach that any brute force attempt would be pointless. Whatever his shackles were, he didn't know. He could try magic, but with Banner's transfigurative hobbles also gone, it was unlikely in his best interest to attempt anything. Luck, for good or ill, constantly followed this beast of a man.

"An expert in knots and bondage, are we, Dr Banner?" He wasn't too injured for sarcasm. "The way we _get out_ is you untie me and I open the 'magical door'."  
"Ha! Oh, that's really good. Humor even now. I am _really_ impressed." He could hear the resignation in his voice, despite his buoyant words. "Well, the only other two ways this ends is you either wait for me to die and escape by yourself, or we cooperate."

"Are you a betting man, Dr Banner?" He intoned dryly.  
"No.  Just desperate. That nice slice job you did on my chest is healed, but my head is a garbage dump right now. I'm just trying not to fall unconscious again with the worry that my concussion may cause me to not wake up at all." He chuckled softly. "This has been a _great_ couple of days. Just the _best_. I get to relive all my favorite memories, have some new nightmares created, and then find out the crazy super villain from Asgard had a freakishly similar childhood."

"You _will not speak_ of it!" Loki had just enough strength to snap at him, rage blossoming from his curved lips.  
"I hate to argue with you, but the sooner you take me back to Earth, the sooner I stop reminding you about it." He could hear Bruce slump to the ground, legs weak. "Is it really true you were responsible for killing both your parents? Thor didn't say anything about Odin being dead-"  
"He is _not my father!_ " The second he said it, Loki wished he could eat his own words. He'd only stirred Banner's curiosity. And now that he knew the other man so well, he knew the scientist doubtless shared Loki's penchant for curiosity.

"No? Oh boy, that helps to explain why you flipped out. You must have even more of a messed up family life than I do. And that's saying something." Both men were silent, but Loki could hear him fidgeting, words stuck in his mouth. For his sake, Loki thought, he ought to choose his next words carefully...

"I'm-I'm sorry. I won't ask about it." He sighed, and Loki was sure he was pushing his non-existent glasses back up his nose, a feeble habit he'd noticed over the last three days. "My dad was an awful, cruel, psychotic mess. Nothing I could do would ever please him. Yours couldn't have been as bad as that, but it's your cross to carry, not mine. I got enough on my own." _'Sorry?'_ Was this sympathy? What kind of nonsense strategy was Banner trying?  
"Sympathy for those with no voice, eh? Is this your inner 'vegetarian' trying to talk me into letting you out?" It was Bruce's turn to chuckle, but he likely only laughed so hard because of the concussion.

"Oh god, no. You really _are_ funny, aren't you? I'm just trying to empathize with a fellow monster before I die."  Bruce heaved a great sigh.  "Because that's what we are, aren't we?" He giggled again. "Two monsters trapped with each other at the bottom of a well. This sounds like a bad 80s sitcom." Whatever that was, it made Banner chuckle again like a schoolgirl.

Loki was confident this was another form of Midgardian psychological torture. To be stuck with a simpering madman vomiting obtuse banalities until he expired. The Trickster had patience, however. After all, he'd endured far worse: at the hands of his brother, his father, Thanos, Surtur-

"A-and I'm sorry about your mom, too. If she managed to raised you and Thor without going crazy, she must have been one amazing lady-"  
"You will _keep_ your impudent mouth closed or  _I will make good_ on my promise and feed your tongue to the midden boars!" His voice shredded at the edges, threatening to fracture. It was worth it to scream unrestrained at the mortal, veins taut in his neck, even if it caused pain to blossom in his crushed chest.

"Whoa, buddy. You sound like a broken record." Whatever that was. "I'm trying to see your point of view. I'm sure your mom was great. I'm... sorry she died. I know what that's like..."

Something broke inside Loki. He could deal with dredging up Laufey's murder. Regret certainly gnawed at him that he killed his father before he even knew his true origins. It felt as though an entire life path was severed from him, like the Fates dropped the ground out from under his feet.

But Frigga. Oh, that was different. He had buried her death deep at his core. She was the only one in the cosmos who knew exactly who and what he was - truly knew his past - and loved him unconditionally despite it. She was beyond reproach, blemishless and kind. And he'd laid an easy path for her murderer with nary a care.

He tried to hold it back, but it was too much. Unseen, the tears spilled silently over his cheeks and down onto the floor. Now Frigga was dead and he was truly alone. He wasn't even afforded the opportunity to pay his respects, buried down in the dungeons like the worthless cur he was while Asgard mourned its greatest queen.

"Loki?" The room was filled with silence while clarity dawned on the scientist. "Oh god, I'm sorry. Really. ...I'm only trying to mend fences before I pass out for good. I -  I didn't mean-"  
"She was the _best_ and most _brilliant_ light in the galaxy. She outshone a million stars." His restrained sobs carved wet paths through his words. "I didn't deserve her love, but she gave it fully and without condition. I... I loved her, in my meager _worthless_ way." The two men sat in silence for a long while. Bruce had no words and Loki was beyond them now, his silver tongue fruitless.

"My mother... Rebecca. She was beyond amazing. She cared for me 24/7, even when I know I sometimes... scared her. I think she was worried I was going to turn into the man my father was. Which is probably one of the reasons I try so hard now." He paused for breath, gathering his scattering thoughts. "I remember the little things, like the way her hair curled after she wore it up. The smell of cigarettes over breakfast." Bruce steadied his breathing, his head still a knotted, painful mess. "Every hit she took for me, I would've taken a hundred times over if I could have." The silence now was mutual, less awkward.

 

 

There was nothing left to do.  
Loki sighed, defeated, and spoke as clearly as his ragged voice permitted.

"Dr Banner.  What if told you we've never left Midgard." Bruce turned his head as fast as his concussion would allow.  
"W-what?"  
"I've lost this game, I'll concede that." He was silent for a long minute, gathering his thoughts. Bruce could feel Loki was once more plastering on his stoic mask, more difficult by leagues now. "I'm weary of this. You're free to go." Loki waved his bound hands at the wall, and a door opened silently. Trees, grass, and sunshine greeted Bruce's eyes. He tried to get to his feet, but he was too injured, too weak. The doctor dragged himself along the ground until he reached the opening. The sunshine was warm on his skin. It felt so good, like home. It was home after all, right?

He looked back at the demi-god, still prone on the floor, a shell of his former self.  
"Do you... do you want me to untie you?" Loki scoffed, insulted, but continued to put up a false front.  
"I do not need the _assistance_ of such a feeble mortal creature. Leave now while I am uncharacteristically generous."

"You, you should know - the pants will probably weaken enough for you to get out of them in about another... 4 to 12 hours? Their half-life is only 300 kiloseconds. And I think I've been here for... nearly 3 days?" Banner must have suffered some brain damage as well.  
" _What_?" Loki turned his head to stare at Bruce, incredulous. The prone man was nude, no clothes in sight. It was... a strange sight at the least.  
"The pants. I tied you up with my pants. They're made from a new isotope we created with the Tesseract data. This is the best version so far, they can't possibly tear. But they only last so long." Pants. He was tied up with the monster's trousers?! Which meant he'd just carved his soul up in front of a naked prisoner, totally defenseless. Loki's internalized debasement new no end.

" _Leave. Now._ " Loki ground out. "And pray our paths _never_ cross again." Bruce didn't have to be told twice. He continued to crawl out of the door, hugging the grass and thanking all the non-existent gods he was back. The door in space slid shut as if it never even existed and the trees in Central Park continued to wave gracefully in the sunny air as if nothing spectacular had happened.

 

***

 

Bruce was found minutes later by a group of ultimate Frisbee players. A 911 call, an ambulance ride, a hospital gown, a lot of NSAIDs, IV fluids, and 10 minutes of blissful solitude was all it took for him to be reunited with Tony and the team.

 

 

***


	11. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bruce tries to find his place now that he's back in 'the real world'.

Tony and Erik immediately pressed him for information, but he was too doped up on oxycodone and his emotions were too strung out to be able to answer any of their questions.

Where were you?  
What happened?  
Was there anyone other than Loki?  
What did he do to you?  
Where are your pants?

He had to smile at the last, but deferred all answers. For now.  
Eventually the nursing staff intervened: standing up against the intensity of Iron Man required an energy he simply didn't have. He fell into dreamless sleep. Small blessings.

Since Bruce's only lingering injuries were dehydration and a concussion, he was released from the hospital within 48 hours. His transformation during Loki's attack had healed the various bruises on his body, the abrasions on his head, and the deep wound in his chest. Being cursed, even like this, had some advantages.

The return to Stark Tower was more difficult. He couldn't beg off Tony's questions or Erik's probing anymore.  
"So.  Liberty Island... to _us_... it was a 'now we see you, now we don't'. You and Loki just zapped out of existence. What _happened_?" Tony got right to the point. Bruce's hands curled protectively around his steaming cup of herbal tea.  
"I honestly don't know. I was transforming into the Hulk, and then I blacked out. I don't know how Loki managed it." His body language radiated discomfort, but Stark was oblivious.  
"So then, you were in a prison? Or did he take you to Asgard? Do you know where you were?"  
"N-no, it was just a dark stone room."  
"How did you end up back in Central Park?"  
"I-I don't know. He said we'd never left, but I don't know if that was a lie or the truth."  
"But... how could you have been in Central Park?  We would have picked up an energy signature at the very least."  
"I don't know, Tony... It's not like I had a firm grip on the situation." He set the tea down and buried his head in his hands.

Tony was exasperated, and he looked to the other people in the room for help. Erik took the lead.  
"Bruce, it's not your fault. This was just so unexpected. If Loki can snatch you, of all people, out of the blue..." Natasha finished his unspoken thoughts.  
"Then... what hope do the rest of us have? He could grab any one of us now without warning." The thought was pretty damn unsettling, and the three shared a long look that spoke volumes.

Bruce's response was barely audible from his crouched position.

"What was that?" Natasha gently prompted. Bruce sat up straight, smoothing out his hair, pushing his glasses up his nose in a nervous gesture. It was good to have his spectacles back.  
"I said: he's not coming for you. I mean, probably not."  
"That seems too good to be true.  Why not?"  
"Because, because- he was _just_ after me. Some revenge trip." Natasha shook her head slowly, disbelieving.  
"Was this all for..." the fog cleared from her eyes. "Of course. The Hulk destroyed his plans to take over Earth. He pummeled him _literally_ into Stark Tower. Yeah, if anyone can hold a grudge, I'm sure it's a narcissist who's thousands of years old with an ego to match." Bruce nodded in agreement. Experience taught him the less said, the better. He also didn't want to dredge up his painful memories anymore. Not for Loki, not for the team.  
"Yep. Not difficult to put two and two together." He grew quiet again, pulling the cup of tea close to his chest and closing his eyes.

Tony wouldn't let him go so easily.

"So what happened while you were his prisoner? Did he make you listen to his boring speeches about taking over the planet? Did he whine about Thor being a pansy?"  
"No, _no_ , he..." Bruce's heart rate sped up. He couldn't live through all this again, dissect wounds freshly opened. His heart bled out on that torture table, he had wept until he was dizzy from dehydration. Maybe six months from now, maybe a year, but not _now_. Holy christ. He took a deep breath and counted to 15 to steady his heart beats. No green, not now. No danger, not now. Not now. Ssshhh. Not now.

"I can't really remember. He had me knocked out most of the time." He lied through his teeth, eyes still shut tight. Tony's eyebrow quirked immediately.  
"You don't remember? He had you for nearly _three days_." Bruce was unacquainted with the art of lying, and it was clearly apparent.  
"No, it was a total haze. I was unconscious most of the time." That was a half-truth, he reasoned. Not a full-blown lie.  
"Why would he keep you unconscious if he was extracting revenge?" Now even Natasha was questioning his badly fabricated lie. It was overwhelming to be the subject of her finely honed interrogation skills. She was open, friendly, lips slightly parted. Threatening and non-threatening all at once. It felt like a betrayal. They had been getting closer, so he thought. But... could he now believe her affection was genuine? Was it a softer method of controlling the beast? Keeping your friends close and the city-destroying-chaotic-risks closer?

Oh, god.

It was a stab through his heart, and he wasn't savvy enough to keep the pain from displaying across his face. She reacted, minutely, and backed off, incorrectly sensing his internal agony was due to another reason entirely.  
"It's okay, Bruce. We don't have to go over this now. We're just worried about you. Loki is one card shy of a full deck, we all know that. I can't imagine he just invited you over to talk." Bruce winced again, pulling further into himself. He _couldn't_ tread that path again. Not now.

Erik intervened at long last, sympathies of an introvert bleeding through.  
"Let's let our friend get some rest. He hasn't had any in days. Afterwards, we can talk more."

 

***

 

Afterwards...

'Afterwards' was an unfriendly word that translated into little but more awkward conversations between him, Tony, Erik, and Ms Romanoff. It cut through him to call her that in his head, when he longed to name her by more tender endearments. Thankfully it was a shallow wound. It healed over, but was still sore when he saw her don a mask in his presence, shutting out what he'd assumed to be her true face. Maybe it wasn't. Maybe their friendship was all a lie, all along.

Natasha was the queen of lies. And Loki the god of. Bruce was just a petty amateur, but he stuck to his unwavering story of being wholly unconscious during his abduction. Eventually the trio gave up and called in the heavy artillery: one of SHIELD's myriad psychologists.

They didn't trust him anymore, that's how it appeared now. Had he been brainwashed by Loki? Was he under his control, a sleeper agent? Refusing to give up details of his captor only deepened their suspicion.

But how _dare they?_ He'd been nothing but loyal to their cause, even after the unwanted spotlight it afforded him. All the times he'd had to hand control over to his inner beast and pray that he didn't destroy something precious and innocent again.

 

Oh how fun it _wasn't_ to be mentally poked and prodded by a professional. Not that Natasha was an amateur, but she didn't maintain the professional detachment this peon exuded from every one of his Calvin Klein-clad pores. Bruce sighed in frustration and pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. He had to remain calm, but everything this loathsome beetle did pushed his buttons.

"Have you been sleeping well since your return to Stark Tower?" What an asinine question.  
"About as well as you can imagine."  
"What are the dreams about? In general?" He gritted his teeth. An apparent ploy.  
"Nothing, just happy dreams where all my friends are unicorns and they eat cake and poop glitter and I get to eat their glittery poop." The psychologist didn't bat an eye at Bruce's deadpan delivery.  
"Did something similar happen when you were with Loki? Did he force you to do something you found repugnant?"  
"Yes, he forced me to eat unicorn poop. But it was _so delicious_ , you wouldn't _believe_." God, he was starting to _sound_ like Loki.

"Dr Banner, let's be serious with each other. I respect you've been through a horrible ordeal. We just want to make sure that you, deep down, are coping. That you're not suffering from any latent psychological damage and that we can rule out anything like Stockholm Syndrome or so forth. Once we determine that, we can plan a path: together, so you can return to being a full-fledged member of the team."

What?

"I'm-I'm sorry - a-are you _removing_ me from the Avengers team?" His blood began to beat like a drum.  
"No doctor, nothing of the kind. We just want to be sure that you won't be overstretching yourself mentally or emotionally. We want what's best for you and for the whole team."  
"It sure _sounds_ like I'm off the team," his tone was nothing but defensive now, and he crossed his arms, certain that his body language was blunt enough to strike the man in the forehead.  
"No, no, Bruce. Trust me. Your friends want you on the team. You're a valued member of the team. They're just worried about you."

Trust. Friends. Valued. Worried.  
Pop-psych buzzwords.  These concepts suddenly felt foreign to him. Euphemisms to extract his greatest potential to the Avengers, to SHIELD. To collar and tether the beast to their own designs. It was a feeling that gathered like cold lead in his stomach. Almost as if the feeling was not his, but another's.

 

Bruce laid awake that night, musing over what had happened for the thousandth time. Loki had hurt him, undoubtedly. He'd assaulted him, smashed him into the walls, gagged him, starved him, nearly drown him, and then actually stabbed him. On top of it all, he had probed the depths of his thoughts and his consciousness to extract his most painful memories and twist them like a jagged knife in his stomach.

But at the end, why had he let him go? It was the question that Tony and team, SHIELD and their dreadful psychologists had most wanted an answer to. Did Loki let him go? No? Then how had Bruce escaped?

 

'Any beast is capable of love for its mother. You're not _special_.'

The words floated unbidden through his mind. Loki had lost it, pure and simple. His memories were a little hazy from the deprivation and the concussion, but he remembered quite plainly that the erstwhile prince of Asgard had broken down and cried in front of him. He said they were similar. Their parents were dead, by their own action or inaction. They had been betrayed from birth. They had grown up heirs to a cursed existence. Bruce: through the rage he inherited and learned from his father. Loki: through the devil only knew what.

And they'd both gotten so low they'd tried to take their own lives. That wasn't something to be taken lightly. To be able to envision and desire, no: _crave_ , your own demise. It was the blackest self-imprisonment one could imagine.

Bruce knew it was dangerous to entertain these thoughts, but he couldn't help letting his mind wander further, trying to empathize with the villain. What had he gone through? His haughty porcelain features had cracked, shattering into a rage more bitter than Bruce had ever known in his few short decades of life. Rage, contorting in front of him into boundless naked grief.

His father. He'd murdered him. Just like Bruce.  
His mother's death. He was responsible. Just like Bruce.

He was a monster, just like Bruce.

Bruce found himself getting craftier at lying to the psychologists with each passing day. And his nights filled more fully with thoughts of one lithe, pale demon. One who had dragged the mask from his own face.  Whose eyes were depthless sadness.  Whose smiles cut like candy razorblades.

 

***

 

AVENGERS ASSEMBLE

As it occurred, when the chips were _truly_ down and Earth was facing a foe capable of planet-wide destruction, SHIELD's reservations about Bruce abruptly dissolved. He'd passed their risk assessment. The cost/benefit analysis produced a favorable outcome. The ones and zeroes lined up.  He was once again, with whiplash speed, the 'strongest Avenger' and a welcome member of the team.

But inside, he was more than a little bitter at his treatment. Once again being held at arm's length like a rabid beast. Hulk and Bruce may have been separate entities, but his reservations and resentment bled into the Hulk's subconscious. The Scarlet Witch's terrifying visions in the fight with Ultron only dug deeper at wounds that had begun to heal over. Everything considered, once the Avengers were safe from danger, his alter ego reacted, spiriting himself and Bruce far away from the source of their agony, out to the stars to find a new path.

Anything was better than this indefinite purgatory.

Right?

 

 

 

***


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Loki's POV. Things get strange, to say the least.  
> Spoilers for Thor 3, but you knew that was coming.

 

Loki's dreams, if ever pleasant, were significantly less so after holding Bruce prisoner. At first, the only subject was Frigga, unmercifully dying over and over again.

Loki had never seen the blow from Kurse that killed his adopted mother, so his clever brain conjured a thousand different ways for her to die. Throat crushed. Head severed from body. Disemboweled. Veins opened. Horrid. _Unbearable_.

Later it was Laufey in his dreams, dying in slow motion by his own pale hand.  Full of the truth he'd been blind to at the time. Eventually it was the little children of Jotunheim, fiery deaths accompanied by soprano shrieks as he burnt them and their realm into dirty puddles of bloody snow.

Lastly, his dreams were of Laufey killing Frigga before desecrating her body and then torturing Dr Banner while Loki watched. The latter portion of the dream shouldn't have effected him so, but he woke in a cold sweat the first time. And the second. The third, he awoke and threw Gungnir across the room, splitting a massive crack into the door of the royal bedchamber.

 

During his days, disguised as Odin ruling Asgard, he was sufficiently distracted through his waking hours by the antics he crafted and the theatrical plays the good citizens performed at his whim. But he began to increasingly dread nightfall and the inexorable slip into slumber that took him right back to his imagined terrors.

The dream started fairly normal. Frigga, on the shore this time, fighting Laufey. She was nearly as impressive a warrior as a mother and queen. But then an inevitable fall, the fiend's swift blade, and the blood blossoming on his mother's bosom as she perished. The dream continued relentlessly. Loki, shackled to the Bifrost bridge, impotent to change the outcome, watching as Laufey sliced Dr Banner's fingers off one by one. The mortal screamed, begged for his life, his god, his mother. Laufey was relentless.

When he reached the tenth finger however, Banner transformed into the green incubus and deftly ripped Laufey's head from his body. The beast threw the disembodied head into the city of Asgard and then turned his snarling wrath on Loki, still shackled. Green eyes conveyed his murderous intent. Loki pled with the creature, but knew it was no use bargaining with a rabid animal.

Just before the monster arrived to break his body anew, he transformed back into Banner. 'It's okay', he was saying in soft murmured tones, his glasses askew on his face, hair a tangled mess. 'I know what you've been through', he whispered. 'I'm a vegetarian, don't worry'. It all made perfect sense in his dream state. Then Doctor Banner reached down, brushed his hair from his forehead and kissed him softly on the lips.

When Loki woke, he was so disturbed he could not return to sleep.

 

***

 

The dreams progressed from there. Dr Banner reliably achieved gruesome vengeance for Frigga's death on Laufey, and sometimes Kurse, or even hilariously one time Thor. And then he would walk up to Loki. Honest brown eyes open and warm. And his own body was on fire with longing. Lips parted and begging like some wanton wench. And the doctor would kiss him full, gently, on the lips.

Mercilessly, the dreams did not stop there. Soon, Loki was kissing him back, still shackled to the Bifrost by Laufey's chains. And then Banner was sucking on his neck and telling him they were meant to be. And that he would turn the whole realm 'vegetarian', and rule Midgard together, and start an '80s sitcom' about Asgard. None of it made sense. His heart was racing as he woke, fatigued, gasping for breath.

Loki began to obsess. How could he make the hateful dreams stop? He was one of the most powerful sorcerers in the known universe, but he couldn't control his own _mind_?! It was ridiculous. At his wits' end, he submitted and sought the advice of a palace healer. Disguised as Odin made cowing to ask for help slightly easier. With carefully woven spells girding his bed, he slept soundly for one blessed night. The next night however, he was inundated by the visions again.  Unshackled from the bridge, he corded his fingers hungrily through Dr Banner's hair as their lips met.

 

The Norns must have intervened then, in their twisted ironic fashion, because Thor came, and his grand ruse was exposed.  And then Odin died with unsettling finality, and Hela backhanded him like an errant fly into the stream of the Bifrost, and Loki went tumbling completely across the known universe.

He had no more time for obsessing over obtuse, disturbing dreams as he fought his way handily out of the biggest trash heap he could ever comprehend and into the clutches of the third scariest creature he'd met in his long life.

Loki turned on the charm and found he could easily predict the Grandmaster's whims, being a creature of chaos such as himself. Sakaar wasn't _all_ bad. He wasn't treated like a prince, but certainly some form of lesser nobility. An earl, perhaps. He had all the women he wanted, an endless opulent wardrobe, excellent entertainment, and open license to craft all the mayhem and antics he chose, provided the subject of his games wasn't either the Grandmaster or his favorite 'Scrappers'.

Life was great. The Grandmaster took to him in a specific way, but his participation in his recurrent orgies was a pittance to pay to be kept in this luxuriant lifestyle. He found the Grandmaster physically appealing and a clever challenge to outwit. Keeping an arm's length distance between himself and the green monster was of little thought since he was obviously light years away from Midgard.

 

***

 

But then fate dealt Loki another awful hand. His thoughts spilled readily from his lips as he gazed on the green incubus.  
  
"I have to get off this planet."  
Banner _wasn't_ safely on Earth after all, but _here_ in his fragile and capricious paradise. If Banner ever saw him, he knew his life would be forfeit. He spared a thought for all the misery he'd subjected Banner to and internally winced.

After his failed attempt to subjugate Midgard, while Loki was captured and at his weakest, Banner had successfully restrained himself. He was shackled and transported back to Asgard a prisoner, but remained untouched, unabused. Then. 

Now, as he watched the beast toss Thor around the arena like a plaything, Loki knew he wouldn't be afforded the same deference a second time, especially after their last encounter and the premeditated way he tortured the scientist.

Trepidation aside, he spared a thought to muse on how _fucking good_ it felt to watch Banner smash Thor into the dirt.

 

Unfortunately, Thor succeeded in the end and Loki wasn't lucky enough to slip off Sakaar before being found out. The first time he encountered Banner, the doctor was still in the guise of his green monster and paid Loki little attention, living as he was: enjoying the varied benefits of an honored champion. The second time, Loki was in chains, and Banner had reverted to his mortal appearance. He wasn't at all focused on Loki. Rather, he was strictly concerned on keeping his heart rate down and finding out how he'd gotten from Earth to an alien planet.

Interesting. The green monster and the doctor did not share the same mind and memories? Loki filed that tidbit away for later.

The third time was only after Thor had betrayed him. The indignity of it! An incited revolution helped him steal a starship, and for the sake of Asgard's people, he donned the mask of 'Loki, Benign Trickster and Champion of the People'. He shouldn't let himself be accused of genocide twice in one decade.

On Asgard, Banner had shifted into the rabid monster once again. He was an enigma Loki couldn't quite figure out. But there was nary any time for introspection in the destruction and chaos. With Surtur unleashed and Hela defeated, he found himself on the bridge of the stolen starship with the detritus of his adopted homeland receding behind them. Dr Banner was crumpled on the floor, recovering, only a few paces away. Neither man threw a punch or slung a verbal barb. Their eyes flitted back and forth, neither one keen to capture the other's gaze for more than a moment.

Awkward didn't begin to cover it.

"I didn't know you were on Sakaar." There was an unvoiced question, but Bruce only shrugged in response, exhausted.  
"It was just a good time to see the galaxy." A poor lie. There was something else there, but Loki let it drop.

Strange times, indeed.

 

***

 

There was only so much room on a ship holding thousands of people. The two men encountered each other not long afterward.  
"Dr Banner."  
"Loki." Bruce sized him up with an appraising look, as one would a venomous snake.  
The silence now was certainly awkward. Banner broke it first in his characteristic nonchalance.

"So... You look good. Time on a foreign planet with a guy that would make Caesar blush has... been good to you." Another cryptic Midgardian reference, but he caught the basic meaning.  
"Undoubtedly. It was more my element, so to speak."  
The two men avoided looking at each other, focusing on interesting bits of debris on the floor.

"It would be awfully honorable of you if you'd let me know _when_ exactly you plan on killing me." The statement caught Bruce off guard.  
" _Killing_ you? Why, what have you done now?"  
"Oh, nothing recently. Just thinking about the time that I held you captive and tortured you relentlessly before trying to slide a blade into your heart." Honesty was a refreshing strategy sometimes. But he wasn't ready when Bruce laughed out loud. "Do you... still suffer from a head injury?" Loki was beyond perplexed.

"Ha, no, I'm doing pretty good, all things considered. Including losing two years trapped in my own mind..." He shook his head, as if to clear it. "I don't plan on killing you, Loki. Well, not today at least. I can't promise tomorrow." This time it was Loki's turn to smile, quite nervously.  
" _Touche_ , Dr Banner. Well then, shall we call it an uneasy truce until one of us does something unforgivable again? And by 'one of us', of course I mean me?"  
Bruce chuckled softly.  
"Are you always this funny?" His lips split in an amused smile and his eyes crinkled at the edges, unframed by glasses. "Honestly, you're still 'bag of cats' crazy, but it's a weird-stand-up-humor kind of crazy now, I think?" Loki arched one perfect eyebrow in confusion.  
"Your references, as always, are beyond me." The trickster knew when to make a graceful exit and inclined his head slightly, turning on his heel. "Good evening, Dr Banner."

 

***

 

Loki slept deeply on the starship after having fought such an exhausting battle. His disturbing dreams took the opportunity to return. It wasn't Frigga on the beach or Loki on the Bifrost. No, instead Loki had Banner strapped tightly down to the plinth in his oubliette again. The doctor was speaking Midgardian gibberish that defied the AllSpeak.  
"Space shuttle, Caesar's yo-yo."  
"Quiet, you _wretch!_ "  
"Olympia Dukakis.  Fromage is French for cheese."  
"Shut up, _shut up!!!_ "  
"Scrapper 142, whiskey in the jar-o, Reindeer Games."  
" _Norns!_ You infuriating worm.  I will _make_ you shut up!" Loki pulled the Morphesean Ingot from thin air and pried Banner's lower jaw open with one hand. He jabbed the device all the way to the back of Banner's throat as before, watching him gag and tears form in his eyes in sadistic delight. The rush of power and domination filled his veins with pleasure. Loki loosened the hand holding Banner's jaw tight, leaving the Ingot firmly in place.

"See? _Isn't that better?_ The Ingot won't hurt you. And it makes you _silent_."  
With his jaw released, Banner's demeanor inexplicably calmed. His mouth and lips closed around the Ingot resting on his tongue. He closed his eyes. He started breathing through his nose. His lips quivered around the Ingot's length. It was apparent he was laving it with his tongue through closed lips. His jaw flexed and he swallowed roughly, his Adam's apple convulsing under his skin. And he began to moan softly.  The sound set his nerves on fire and his blood racing.

Loki bolted upright, sweat beading his forehead. These dreams were _unbearable!_ Maybe he should go back to Sakaar?! The dreams would stop then, of course. Of course. Yes. _Norns_ , he'd face the Grandmaster's wrath, but that would be okay.  
Anything, _anything_ , other than fantasizing about one of his greatest enemies. To top it off, his body had betrayed him and he'd become erect during his sleep.

Furiously, he steeled his jaw tightly and meditated on abstract thoughts of revenge. It wasn't long before regained control of himself and left his warm blankets to pace about the ship. Brainless activity was the only thing that would keep his traitorous mind from drifting off again.

 

 

 

***


	13. Chapter 13

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Okay, folks. This is your last chance to get off the crazy train.  
> Smut dead ahead.  
> It's a bit more emotion than I usually try for, but it's character development, gosh darn it.  
> And then, I promise, some total mindfuckery. :)
> 
> PS - this whole thing is written now and just being edited. We're only about halfway through.  
> Prepare thyself. Here be dragons.

 

"Loki."  
"Dr Banner." How had he allowed himself to cross paths with the mortal? He'd been too _stupidly_ preoccupied to notice. The silence between them was now a huge canyon. It was an agonizing moment before Bruce dared to cross it.

"So... What're you doing up? I figured you'd be asleep." He fidgeted with his borrowed pair of glasses, thick unfamiliar frames keeping his eyes lidded and carefully focused on the floor. "M-most everyone is right now. There's a handful of us doing rounds, though."

 _Lie:_ he thought. Lie just as you were born for it. Lie through those sharp teeth of yours. It's the easiest thing in the world.

"I couldn't sleep. I've had... extremely disturbing dreams." _Coward_. Wretch.  
"Oh- I'm sorry to hear that." Genuine concern creased Bruce's forehead. "Do you want to talk about it?"  
"No. _No,_ I don't want to talk about it. Especially not with _you_ ," he spat more forcefully than he intended. Bruce raised his hands in mock surrender.  
"Okay, no worries, I won't pry. I know what that's like," Banner winced, curling into himself slightly. "Oh shit, I don't mean _that_ , I mean... uh... just, I just want to offer an ear if you ever need it.  Um, not literally." He swallowed nervously and Loki's eyes were drawn like magnets to his bobbing throat. "What I mean is, Thor told me about what happened to your dad. I mean, your adopted dad, right? I... it's- I'm really sorry, is all and since we have this weird kind of connection, well, I just wanted to offer..." He couldn't finish his ramblings, forfeiting looking Loki in the eyes by settling for his own feet instead. Now Loki's hackles were fully up, on the offensive.

" _Connection?_ What have you told Thor, or _anyone_ , about our 'connection'?" His teeth exposed, the threat was thinly veiled, even though he was hardly in a position to threaten such a creature.  
"Whoa! Slow down, man." Bruce put his hands up defensively. "Don't assume I've told anyone. In fact, I haven't." The doctor took a moment to steady himself, running fingers through his hair, licking his lips and swallowing compulsively again. Damn it, it was incredibly distracting.

"Yes: you did some extremely hurtful things to me. Including attempted _murder_. And no, you're not the only one who has even more messed up dreams now." He plucked up the courage to stare Loki in the eye. "Why do you think I volunteered to do rounds when I should be sleeping? Do you know how many times I've watched either you or General Ross kill Betty in my mind since that whole _fucked-up sleepover?_ But no, I haven't told Thor, or that SHIELD shrink, or Tony, or _anyone_." Bruce was indignant, and his jaw was set, eyes alight. "We have some pretty messed up shit that's happened to us in common. I don't go around telling _everyone_ about my experiences, and I'm not about to betray yours either." If he wasn't so vehement, Loki would have doubted him, but Bruce's vivid brown eyes were locked on his, fairly glowing with his disgusting sense of truth and integrity. It was charming, in a way.  
  
Loki had no logical choice but to back down, so he did so in the way he calculated would throw Banner the most off kilter. He forced his brow to relax, his eyes wide and unguarded.  
"...Thank you."  
"Um, um... You're welcome?" Voila. Bruce blinked slowly, unbalanced. Loki couldn't help but chuckle at his own gamesmanship, mask falling away.  
"Oh, Doctor Banner. If you weren't such an insufferable vegetarian, I might actually enjoy spending time with you. You are so _easy_ to toy with."  
"Alright...?" Bruce was plainly bewildered. "Now... I'm going to go back to my 'bag of cats' theory and continue on my rounds." He tipped an invisible hat to Loki. "Have a good 'night'."

 

***

 

After that particular weight was lifted, Loki found sleep easy for the remainder of the night. He wasn't even off-put when Thor suggested a course for Midgard the next 'day'. He had to admit, it actually wasn't the worst idea. The realm was huge and already held at least 10 million people. Another few thousand shouldn't shift the balance. He voiced his agreement, just to throw his political weight, such as it was, behind Thor after having had a tiny _tiny_ hand in saving their people. Banner laughed out loud.

"What is so funny, my friend?" Thor inquired. Banner retorted that Midgard was home to many _billions_ of people, and that as long as their motley gang could make peace with SHIELD, which was a big if, then they would _probably_ be alright, provided they found some remote location like northern Canada to colonize _and_ they made some sort of technological peace offering to the current Prime Minister.

But Loki heard little of that and took the barb with unusual aplomb. He was transfixed on Banner's soft lips, curved into a smile, laughing, conversing with those around him. They were more enticing now than in his dreams, fogged as they were with sleep. He'd never had a chance to really study the doctor. Since they were usually trying to kill one another.

This was _novel._

And Banner was... charismatic despite himself. He wasn't fidgeting like before.  
He was being witty in an intelligent way. He was confident, chin aloft, shoulders squared. His soft eyes crinkled at the edges. When he smiled it was with his whole body. Loki's eyes wandered to his throat when he swallowed. And those plump lips...

He had to stop staring before someone noticed. He had to stop thinking this way: full stop. But Banner had a way of pulling on his lips with his teeth randomly when he was confused or in a socially awkward situation. His rather plump lips. This happened quite frequently.  The action fed curious questions into Loki's head.  Questions about how firm they were.  What they would feel like to touch.  Whether his dreams were prophetic or not.

At the point when Bruce's tongue darted out to lick them nervously, Loki decided it was time to make his hasty retreat.

 

***

 

Bruce assumed he'd offended Loki with his last remark, so he excused himself from the room to track him down. They'd just made peace and now he'd gone and blown the whole thing by needing to be the smartest guy in the room. _Again._ It wasn't long before he found the dark god solitary and leaning on a railing against a porthole window, staring out into the darkness of space. He cleared his throat to get Loki's attention needlessly. Bruce could never sneak up on Loki.

Green eyes looked at him without turning around, catching Bruce's focus with his piercing gaze in the reflection of the glass.

"Are you okay? I'm- I'm sorry I'm a constant know-it-all. It's one of the reasons why I don't have many friends, I... -a-any friends, -y-you know what I mean."  Loki sighed deeply without breaking eye contact.  
"Yet another thing we have in common. I'm well and truly cursed."

"I... I feel like this is deja vu, man." Bruce furrowed his brow, wary. "You confuse the heck out of me." Loki gathered his thoughts for a minute, letting Banner's words hang in the air, biting his own bottom lip in thought. Should he try honesty? For the second time in two days?

Norns! What was _wrong with him?!_

"My dreams. They are about you," he murmured by way of explanation. "I and your green monster are fighting. Or... your monster is fighting others and I am bound."  
He paused for a long moment. "And then the fighting stops..." The silence was interminable as it stretched between them. Loki's eyes were piercing and Bruce was struggling under the weight of his boring glare.  
"That... doesn't sound so bad. What goes wrong?" Loki tried to burn the answer into his eyes through his gaze rather than say it out loud.

He _couldn't_ say it.  
He would _combust_.   
He _would._   
Oh hell. It was futile.  
  
"You."  A sigh that stretched endlessly.  "Kiss me." His heart was racing. He wanted to stopper the words back in his rebellious throat. His blood rushed to his cheeks and at last he had to tear his gaze away from Bruce, staring holes into the porthole sill instead.  
"Oh."

Loki began to shake his head, eyes clenched shut tightly, trying to shake the treasonous thoughts from his brain.  
"This is _absolutely_ _ludicrous_ ," he spat. "They must have whole legions of doctors on your planet that dissect creatures whose minds are as twisted as mine. I-I can't bear it anymore." He buried his head in his hands. Loki failed to notice, but he was gradually hyperventilating, the words racing from his mouth. "I suggest when this craft stops, that we _disembark_ and make a pact to find _opposite sides of the known universe._ You have Midgard, surely. I will take Jotunheim, or Vanaheim. That is, if they'll have me after-" A warm hand on his shoulder stopped him mid-sentence.

"It's- it's called Stockholm Syndrome on Earth. Or in your case, Lima Syndrome." He spaced his words out with relative calm. "When a captor or prisoner develops feelings for the other."

"You _are_ an insufferable know-it-all. Is that the word for it? I thought it was vegetarian." He couldn't help it as a nervous laugh escaped his lips. But he wasn't alone. Bruce chuckled as well.  
"Ah, so _that's_ what you meant. I was pretty confused before, since our earlier discussion on dietary preferences was pretty perfunctory." He laughed softly.  
They both realized at the same time that Bruce's hand was still on his shoulder.  
Bruce's voice became hushed, solemn.

"We have a lot in common, don't we? We know what it's like to be kicked when we're down. And we know what it's like to have the ones closest to us hurt and betray us. And- and we've caused our fair share of hurt as well." Bruce paused to collect his thoughts, licking his lips unconsciously.

" _Stop. Doing. That._ " Bewildered, Bruce looked up, only to see Loki had caught his gaze again. It was electric. It was as if an unstoppable avalanche was suspended in motion 50 feet above a solitary ski chalet.  
_Now_ Bruce knew what those piercing eyes meant. It was overwhelming and an entirely unknown feeling to be the subject of such raw emotion. He wasn't sure he had a name for it, but it hardly mattered in this moment. Had he ever seen it before?

He sincerely doubted. Instinct took over and he turned Loki towards him in one easy motion, cupping his jaw and capturing his lips in a fervent kiss.

Loki tipped the stubbled chin up and deepened it, grasping the shorter man's face in his hands.   
_Oh Norns!_ He wanted to bottle this moment. As insane and ludicrous as it was. Could he replay this over and over for the remainder of his long life? He was gripped with an urgent desire to thread his fingers through Banner's curly hair. 

It was silk. Electric. Amazing. All the facets of his brain shut down and he turned them both, pinning the slighter man aggressively against the nearest bulkhead. His body, though mortal, was solid and warm and quickening moment by moment and Loki found his sanity fleeing. His blood danced through his veins like fire, beginning to pool in lower, more insistent regions.

"Banner." He pulled away just long enough to gasp in a husky timbre. "If you are toying with me, I swear by Idunn I shall make good on _all my previous threats_." Bruce's eyelids opened slowly, like resurfacing from a dream.  
"I... don't think I was entirely honest about the dreams I've been having, either." Bruce pulled him down to his mouth by a handful of his shirt. "I need my goddamn _head_ checked out. But I haven't been able to stop thinking about you." The kiss resumed, Banner pulling at his leather lapels, fingering down the length of his coat, hands finally settling at his waistline. Bliss.

"Where do Asgardian shirts end, by the way?" Loki pulled away for a throaty laugh.  
"If you'd like to find out," he ground his increasingly demanding groin against Bruce's leg, "then I suggest we retreat to another location."

 

***

 

Loki was simply a wet dream come to life. If he could, Bruce would bottle this moment for the rest of his undoubtedly short life. He had an Asgardian prince, no less, doing a slow striptease for him. Teeth bared, eyes sharp, a comprehensive predator.

Asgardians had so many clothes. Too many. Loki's coat was gone and he'd totally unbuttoned and shucked his outer cloak too, but there was another layer of leather underneath. And what looked like yet another undergarment beneath that. Bruce had just a glimpse of the hollow at Loki's throat where his collar bones perched seductively, and of the white skin that was the beginning of his chest. Bruce was withering under that piercing green gaze. He felt like he was going to explode.

"You _are_ sadistic, you know?" His words swiped the I-will-devour-you-slowly grin from Loki's face and replaced it with a grimace of consternation. "What?" he pleaded.  
" _Can_ we do this?" Loki admitted. "What I mean is: what I put you through was unforgivable, given our new insights on one another. How can you want this and be anywhere near sane? How can you want _me_ , and be anywhere near sane?" It was a valid question. Bruce felt his erection flag.

"Y-you're right, this doesn't make sense from an outside perspective." He ran one hand through his hair, nervously. "I couldn't imagine this two years ago, _at all_ , my god." Bruce sat on the cartons that had been turned into a makeshift cot by a few folded up blankets earlier in their journey from Asgard. Yes, his erection was completely gone now. "I'm going to try and say this without turning completely into a girl, so please don't laugh." Loki's eyes were serious, and he nodded solemnly. "My mother knew me when I was little. Completely knew me. She knew my strengths and my weaknesses, and she knew the monster I could turn into, had I followed in my father's footsteps. But she loved me regardless." Bruce found he couldn't look at Loki anymore, picking a spot on the ground to glare at instead.  
"You forced my darkest memories out of me. Hell, you literally mind-raped me. I didn't even know that type of stuff existed until we met you." He held back and didn't utter the name 'Clint Barton'. Older and wiser, Bruce Banner, older and wiser.

"You've gone through the same," he continued, "and while I didn't force it out of you, I think you _thought_ I did, which subjectively, is pretty similar." He put one hand on Loki's bare waist and drew up the courage to look him in the eye. "If we've both found someone who shares that experience, understands, sympathizes..." He chuckled mirthlessly, "god knows we're both rare creatures... Well, I-I'm willing to put the 'hows' aside for now and see if we can build each other up instead of being each other's worst enemy. Is that fair enough?" he asked, genuinely. Loki contemplated his logic for a few moments, chewing on his lower lip, lost in thought. He dragged the moment out as long as he could, deadpan. "Loki!" The demi-god kept his promise and did not laugh, but the devil grin split his face again. He was still the Trickster, after all.

"You asshole!" Bruce was indignant at being the butt of Loki's own joke.  
"Fair, fair... But you're just too fun to play with, Banner." He placed a searing kiss on the scientist's lips, pushing him back against the wall. "I listened and I agree with your _current_ logic. I may not agree in the 'morning', but for now," his voice turned to a growl, "you're sane enough for me." Bruce wasn't sure if that was a good thing or not, but he was beyond caring as Loki dug under the his t-shirt, plastered with some Midgardian slogan. Bruce gasped deliciously at the icy fingers on his stomach.

Loki really hoped Banner didn't style himself like this everyday, but this meager clothing was blessedly easy to remove. He could have whisked it all away, but as with any new lover, preferred to let Bruce warm up to what was happening.  Take time enough to ache and _want_ and _need_ more. He teased him with kisses, with fingertips on his ribcage, before pulling the garish cotton shirt over his head and off. Loki unbuckled his own armor swiftly, then got to his knees between Banner's legs. He was rewarded with a barely breathed 'holy shit' from his lips as Bruce realized Loki's intentions. He grinned wickedly up at the mortal, relishing the burn on his cheeks and he way his chest moved up and down too quickly. As if he'd just run a marathon. Or he was just about to be sucked off by a god nicknamed 'silvertongue'.

That was a pretty fair reaction, as things go.

Loki magicked the last remaining undergarment from his own torso in one smooth gesture, never failing to break eye contact from his location kneeling on the floor. Bare chested, he slowly worked his fingers into the waistline of Banner's pants. This metal fabric closure was another example of needless Midgardian complications. Loki cheated with a little magic and Bruce couldn't be faulted for failing to notice when the button and his fly were swiftly undone and Loki was snaking his pants off his legs. He was drowning in the imagery in front of him: miles of bare white skin, so white it was almost blue, and dark hair that framed his wicked face lit with delight. _Impossibly_ : for him.

Eye contact. Loki kept it as he first licked his lips and then licked a flat straight line from the base to the tip of Bruce's eager cock. More Midgardian epithets spilled from his lips as he struggled to keep his eyes from rolling back in his head. This particular version of AllSpeak was dirty and Loki found it very agreeable. He guided Bruce into his mouth in one long slow pull. Bruce lost the eye contact game when he hit the back of Loki's throat and his lids fluttered closed. He gripped Loki's shoulders to steady himself as the world dissolved under his feet. The Trickster played, and sucked, and licked, and tongued his tightening balls, and took him deep again and again. He nibbled and even introduced a tiny bit of teeth, all to see what drove his man mad. The answer was: _all of it._

He was beyond skilled at this.  It wasn't very long until Banner was grasping his hair gently in warning of his impending climax. But it was far too _gently_. This creature defied explanation. Bruce murmured through clenched teeth:  
"Oh _god_ Loki. It's- You-you... I- Please... d-don't swallow it, oh my god, oh god, don't, I... it's- oh my g-" incoherent nonsense and he was biting his lip until it turned white. Princes of Asgard may suck cock, but they never swallow. And he did not need to be instructed _thank you very much_. Loki let Bruce spill into his hands instead. He promptly vaporized the evidence into benign gaseous atoms. The doctor collapsed in a lovely, panting heap, all splayed out, nude and debauched, higher faculties gone.

Loki drank in his blissed out form, arm collapsed over his face, mouth gasping in ragged breaths, and filed it away in his mind for future use. Then he patiently waited for him to come back to the land of the living.  
"Loki - Loki, _oh god, wow_." More incoherent nonsense. It sounded like worship, and that was _such_ a turn-on. "You... I-I. _Holy jesus fuck_. I've never come so hard. I've - actually I haven't come in... way _way_ too long." Suddenly Banner was laser focused and his eyes fixed on Loki, hyper aware of his surroundings. "B- because of gamma radiation: where did...? You didn't swallow, did you?" he asked fearfully and shyly. Wonders abound: there was another new and interesting thing to learn about the doctor.

"No... I disposed of it. Gamma _radiation_? Do tell, doctor."  
"Uh, let's save that one for another day, after I've finished giving you the codes to Earth's defense grid." Banner chuckled at his own inside joke, doubtlessly another obscure Midgardian reference. "Right now I think my top priority is attending to _you_." When his voice dropped an octave into a husky chuckle, and he eye-fucked Loki's naked chest, and he licked his lips again... all other thoughts vaporized from Loki's mind. He allowed the smaller, muscular man to guide him onto his back on the makeshift bed.

The scientist struggled with the alien trousers and Loki let him suffer gleefully until it was no longer fun for him. Then he simply magicked away the rest of his garments and attacked Bruce's mouth.   
...It was 'Bruce' now, wasn't it? It was an amusing thought to have when he was being pinned, naked, to a glorified cot on a vagabond spaceship in the middle of nowhere. But in his mind, in that moment, he consciously shifted from 'Banner' to 'Bruce'. And when Loki transmogrified some errant nitrogen molecules into lube, and the doctor's warm hand wrapped around his cock, it was "Bruce, yes..." and it felt so right. His chest tightened and his heart raced. Loki devoured his lips and his neck, in just the manner that had been torturing him these long months in his dreams. He buried his fingers in his hair and licked dirty things into his ears in his native language. He wasn't sure if it was Asgardian or Jotun, and it didn't matter in the least. It only increased the fervor which with Bruce stroked his cock.

He gripped Bruce's shoulders as the good doctor continued his attentive care. He translated:  
"I can't define what you do to me. I can't harness it, or- _Norns_...!" he gasped for breath, "- make sense of it at all. I-I want to _take you_ _entirely_ , every square patch, every-" He gasped. It was hard to focus. "And then I want _more_ ," he growled. Bruce felt delicious goosepimples cover his skin. "I want to feel you around me. I want to watch you come over and over. And I want this, _especially_ when it's too insane to bear. What-" he steadied himself, famous voice faltering and failing with his mounting passion. "What does _that_... h-how does that sound... to..." coherent thought departed.

Bruce kissed him deeply as the demi-god gritted his teeth, exploded over his hand, over his stomach, coating his groin, leaking onto the blankets.  
"Yes, Loki - oh my god, _yes_."  
He panted into Bruce's mouth, gripping his upper arms to stay anchored to reality. Soon enough, he collapsed to one side, eyelids heavy and closed.

Bruce coiled himself around the limp figure and pulled one of the blankets over their combined bodies.  
"Yes, we're both in the same boat," he murmured softly. "We're both fairly fucked, Loki. Let's at least be fucked together." Loki felt the other man's warm breath sigh into his hair in agreement, and slid into sleep.

 

 

***


	14. Chapter 14

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> So last chapter was pretty awesome, right? ;)  
> Yeah... you should go back and read that one again... I'm a sadistic jerk. :(
> 
> Reminder: non-Infinity War compliant.

It may have been an hour or only a few minutes later, Loki was entirely unsure.

His sharp ears pricked up from the sound of footsteps. In half an instant he was awake, mess cleaned, clothes donned, on his feet, and smoothing down his mussed hair. Bruce was not so lucky. He pulled the blanket higher over the man's sleeping form and with a silent apology, cloaked himself invisibly and stole off down the corridor ahead of prying eyes.

Bruce woke to a frowning face made of stone. He was immediately aware of his own solitary naked state.  
"Hey there, little fella. You catching up on some sleep?" Korg's lilting voice was paltry solace for the impending shame he felt.  
"Hey, buddy." His face fell. "I-I'm supposed to be on guard... aren't I?"  
"Yeah, but I suppose it's no big deal since we're on a ship stranded in the middle of space and no-one can get us or even knows where we are anyway." He placed one big blue rocky hand on Bruce's bare shoulder. "So don't you worry about abandoning your post. But... I _am_ kinda surprised you that sleep naked?" Bruce laughed and shrugged with chagrin.

"Yeah, I don't remember how that happened... Anyway, I'm up and it's still my shift." He started to dress. "You want to do rounds together?" Korg's non-existent ears perked up at that.  
"Sure! New Doug has the round after, so we can go get him soon."

Great. He'd woken up naked and alone and normally that was a pretty solid signal. But this _was_ Loki: a total emotional minefield and enigma. Just like himself, if he was honest. He followed Korg down the hallway, pulling on his shirt and glasses. He'd also have to deal with big brother Thor in a matter of minutes. This 'day' was certainly an interesting one.

 

***

 

It wasn't long without Bruce's paradoxically reassuring presence that Loki fell back down into a hole of self-doubt. Four hours, to be precise. He'd worn off some of his excess energy by sparring with Valkyrie and by enchanting all of the ship's food to taste like lemons. On a whim, he'd also whipped up a sex pollen spell and used it on the remaining Honor Guard, leading to much hilarity. But then he fell into a spiral of despondency.

He'd said too much. Far far _far too much_. And he'd grossly overstepped his bounds. He taken Bruce into his confidence. He'd dropped his guard. He'd let the mortal get inside his head. Norns! He'd made himself _vulnerable_. Utterly disgusting. He nearly bit Thor's head off when he benignly inquired after his post-battle state. Was the big dumb animal _implying something?!_ Had Banner told him about their tryst? He was gutted, insecure, angry. A wounded animal defensively circling in his den.

 _Why_ in all the realms had he told him about the dreams? Why say anything? The interminable detention on this spaceship was only temporary, after all. Couldn't he keep his juvenile desperation bottled up for a few mere weeks? Instead, he'd given the keys to his fortress to one of the strongest enemies he'd ever faced. Even if... they had so much in common. Even if... Banner could look straight through him and read the thoughts from his open eyes without judging him. Even if...

He breathed in deeply, straightening his back and standing tall. It mattered not. This little slip. The mortal would only have a few more decades alive anyway, and then he'd take Loki's secret weaknesses to his grave.

Oh, but... a shiver ran down his spine. He'd be alone again. No Frigga, no Bruce, no one who knew him or gave a damn enough to try. He was so tired of being alone. He wandered the halls aimlessly, trying to find a place on this ship that wasn't teeming with Asgardian lice. They were everywhere he looked: men, women, children. He just wanted to be alone and miserable.

 

***

 

Bruce found Loki striding assuredly down a gradually emptying corridor, chin high, pace quick and clipped. As if he had somewhere to be, _five minutes ago_. But he caught a tremor in the corner of his eye. Was this another mask? Was he able to see through Loki so well now? It was a strange and unnerving feeling. Bruce stopped, catching his gaze.

"Hey."  
"Yes, hello." A beat. "Is there something I can help you with?" His look was cold and dismissive. Bruce squared his shoulders, summoning every bit of courage he could.  
"No. Not really. I'm just glad to see you." He wanted to add: 'after you disappeared on me' but thought better of it. He struggled for the right words and Loki turned, striding away.  
"Hey, wait." Bruce trotted after. "Um, I wanted to let you know that I, um, I didn't have any dreams at all last night." His legs skipped to keep pace. "So, so I guess that's a good thing." Loki sniffled in acknowledgement, keeping his eyes fixed straight ahead. "And I still haven't told Thor or anyone _anything_. Honest." He caught Loki glancing at him from the corner of his eyes as he walked. "Jesus, man. Do you have to walk so fast?" The tall god stopped abruptly and Bruce nearly stumbled into him. "Thank you." Loki remained silent. "So... how've you been?"

Loki turned his nose but not his body to glance at the doctor. The stare of a god at a nagging dust-mote. He held his icy glare for another heartbeat, and then his countenance melted into sardonicism, his shoulders sagging, but his voice still haughty and controlled.  
"How have I been? How _banal_." He steepled his fingers at either temple. "I have been a chaos of worms, Banner. I don't often unburden myself on another." He sighed, defeated. "But SOMEHOW, you know me. You cut me to the marrow." Bruce fidgeted for a moment, then placed his hand on Loki's upper arm. He held fast despite the quick shiver that passed through the demi-god.

"Then... maybe you should do it more often." Loki quailed internally under his warm hand. "I meant what I said: we're both fucked, aren't we? There's no reason why we need to hide from one another." Loki looked up into his limpid brown eyes. So open, so wide, so human. So _honest_. The words fell from his lips unbidden.  
" _Norns_ , I want to believe that."  
"So: believe it. You've seen inside me, Loki. You know I mean what I say." Loki spared a thought to inspect the hallways in their proximity, but they were miraculously abandoned. He collapsed into the smaller man's arms, gripping for dear life.

It was a full minute, but at last he murmured into his ear, so softly. Like it was the worst secret in the universe.  
"I-I want to. I want a safe haven. Isn't that what any creature needs? Deserves? No matter how _wretched_?" He kept his eyes shut, afraid to open them to his own traitorous words.

Bruce held him closely and whispered,  
"Let me be that for you. Let's be that for each other." Hope, bruised, dared to blossom in Bruce's core. "No more lies and hurtful games, at least between the two of us. At least when we're alone.  We two monsters." A great dam broke open in Loki's chest.

" _Yes_."

They were both thrown forcefully to the floor in a tangled heap. It was a heartbeat before Bruce realized Loki had not done it, and before Loki realized the same. An alarm shrieked through the empty air above them. The clatter of feet was far off, but reverberated through the metal. Panic tore through them and wrested them apart.

"What's going on?!"  
"I-I don't know. It's..." Loki stared off into space, reaching out with his mind and magic for information. Suddenly his pupils constricted and he grew even paler than normal.  _"Bor's Teeth! It CAN'T be!"_  
"Loki... fill me in?" Bruce discarded his smashed glasses, fear painting his words. Loki jumped to his feet, and assumed a fighting stance.  
"We have to run. I don't know where, but we have to get off this ship. _Now_."  
"From what? What about everyone on board?"  
"This ship is about to become a _cemetery_. All we can do is run. Follow me: I saw the escape pods when we boarded. I can cloak us like discarded debris." He began to sprint down the hall. Bruce followed, calling out after him.  
"Are we under attack? Can't we defend ourselves first, and run later?"  
"You don't UNDERSTAND. _It's Thanos._ I can feel him, just as I felt him in the Void when he held me captive. We have ZERO chance against him." The words brought a chill to Bruce's spine. If the Hulk could best Loki, and Loki was encouraging them to run without hesitating, then how much stronger was this creature than even _both_ of them put together?

They dashed down a flight of stairs. Bruce could hear shrieks and screams in the distance. His pragmatic brain said follow Loki's panicked feet, but his instincts told him to protect their defenseless passengers. At the bottom of the stairs, he stopped, unwilling to go further.  
"But- but we can't abandon Thor and everyone else!" He held onto the railing firmly. Loki stopped long enough to reach back and pull him forcefully onwards but Bruce refused to move.

It didn't matter. Their autonomy was sharply ripped away. The floor split open beneath them and they fell into the gaping space below, past where decks and cargo used to be, onto the solid deck of the helm. As the ache of the fall suffused their bodies, a deep chuckle like the grating of tectonic plates met their ears.

"Little Trickster. How good of you to join us." Loki lifted his head to see Thor, Korg, and Valkyrie, suspended by their throats by an invisible hand, writhing in agony. He sprang to his feet, unwilling to let Thanos see him on his knees. Especially now.  
"My dark liege. How good to see you again." He smiled broadly. "Thank you for releasing me from the bonds these pitiful insects held me in." He bowed deeply from the waist, putting on his best show. "How can I repay you for your graciousness?" Thanos laughed again, low and throaty.  
  
"What a _fool_ you take me for! I see you and all the creatures around you, and how FOND of them you've become." The color drained from Loki's face. Bruce got to his feet behind him, sensing the situation was unstoppably out of their hands. Thor's skin was turning an unnatural shade of blue. "I see how you delight yourself in their embraces. And how you've _betrayed_ me and the task I set for you." Loki moved to speak, but Thanos cut him off. "No, Liesmith. There's no web you can spin to avoid the pain I bring with me."

His power was immense. All conscious beings in that abattoir could see it plainly. Loki was tossed into the air with a mere blink and brought down onto the steel so hard the floor buckled and bent under him. He could feel his spine shattering, his ribs cracking, and then nothing but fiery pain. He gazed in horror as Thanos began to open a hole in his stomach with the force of his mind, drawing his entrails to hang in the air above and quartering him from the inside out.

Loki screamed until his lungs were powder. He couldn't possibly register Bruce screaming his name, but from the vantage his broken neck afforded he did see the utter despair and rage in those warm brown eyes. The traces of genuine tears flowing down his cheeks. 'Crying?' he distantly thought. 'For _me?'_ It was his last thought before Thanos brought down a pillar of steel on his head and violently crushed his skull.

 

 

***


	15. Chapter 15

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hold onto your hats, folks.  
> Extra long chapter ahead.  
>   
> Maybe two if you're lucky. ;)

Darkness. Silence. The absence of sensation cradled him in oblivion. Where was he? When was he? How much time had passed since... whatever came before?

Confusion surrounded him and clouded his brain. It hurt to think. He was aware of his eyelids, and struggled with the effort to open them.

 

  
SIMULATION TERMINATED

 

The red foreboding letters floated in front of his vision. What did it mean? Red, like a warning. Red, like danger. Terminated, like inevitable finality.

As he became aware of his power of vision, he gradually became aware of another sense: touch. Something encapsulated his head. As he concentrated, he found his hands and feet were free, floating. And he was naked. The entire situation was disturbingly unnatural and spiked his heart rate. He pulled at the apparatus on his head desperately, and when the headpiece came free, the ominous red words disappeared. The blackness was swapped for deep dark grey, and he slowly became aware of his surroundings. He was in a claustrophobic pool of liquid, floating. He reasoned it was an enclosed space because a small width above the level of the water was a thin crack where light trickled in from 'outside'. There wasn't anything above him.  He felt around cautiously, exploring the width and depth of the space. It was slightly larger than his body and only a few inches deep.

He was struck with an illogical panic and suddenly the only thing that mattered was getting free. He braced himself against the bottom and pushed with his hands and feet. The lid would not move. He tried again, harder, but the result was the same. Perhaps the enclosure was extremely heavy or he'd become extremely weak. He didn't like the implications of either situation. Adrenaline coursed through his veins and he pushed, _pushed_  like a madman until the veins bulged in his neck. Until he was sure his eyes were popping from their sockets. Finally. The crack widened, and more light entered the cell. He managed to push it slightly off center before he had to set it down and rest. After a minute, he tried again, hooking his fingers in the gap, prying at the lid until he had enough room to stare outside. The light was so bright in comparison to before.  His disused pupils rebelled. All he could see was white.

He continued to struggle until finally the lid was far enough off center that it toppled to the ground. He sat up and slowly began to adjust to the sensation of his back muscles aching, long hair dripping wet all the way down his bare back.  The condensing objects in his vision informed him this was a lab or some other scientific area.

Scientific. That word was 'Midgardian' wasn't it? Even _that_ word held some familiarity to him, but his mind struggled to keep up with all the new information bombarding it.

The room was barely wider and longer than the pod and absent of people, except for himself. It felt frighteningly stark and sterile and certainly, no place he wanted to be found. After resting his muscles for a few short minutes, he attempted to stand, gripping the sides of the pod for balance. He stumbled out on wet feet, inelegantly re-learning how to balance upright. By the time he'd shuffled over to a thin shelving unit and was frantically searching for some type of clothing, he heard the latch click in the door. His eyes scanned for some sharp or menacing object to defend himself with, but the room was devoid of objects.

The door opened on two human figures dressed in Midgardian uniforms. Midgardian? There was that word again. And since when did 'human' become a qualifying adjective in his vocabulary?

"Mr Lawson, you're surprisingly mobile. How are you feeling?" There was something sinister in the woman's tone.  
"Surprisingly mobile? Sorry to disappoint. I'm sure you'd rather I be encapsulated in that vile pod."  
"Of course!" She had the gall to laugh and he snarled unconsciously. "After all, you still have a year left on your sentence."  
"My sentence?"  
"Yes, you don't get off lightly for _manslaughter_ ," she bantered in an affected lighthearted fashion. This was all too strange. Before he could react, the man next to her cleared his throat and handed her a slim metal pad. "However, in light of your recent demise, the current administration has deemed that re-instating you would be cruel and unusual punishment." It was clear from her sardonic lilt that she did not agree with this outcome, but was powerless to stop it. "Therefore, you are a free man."

His head was spinning.  
"Sergeant Bort, please give the prisoner some clothing." She turned her back and walked out of the room while the man threw a bundle at his feet derisively. "You'll have a day of therapy to return your body to relatively normal condition. After which, you are no longer my problem." She was already walking down the hallway, calling behind her as she walked. He hustled to don the starchy pants and shirt and followed after, barefoot, clinging to the walls to keep himself upright. How _dare_ she just walk away, giving him only that cryptic explanation. Did these _insects_ think he was beneath them?!

And then memories came back. Not all, but enough that he remembered he was Loki: god of mischief and rightful heir of Asgard. Adopted brother to Thor, surviving all four of his parents, stripped of his rank and held prisoner in this... Midgard jail?

"Right in here," the woman motioned through an open door into another white room. He suppressed a smile, half a snarl.  The robotic peon was blissfully unaware of who precisely she was talking to.  
"I feel more comfortable out here," Loki drawled. Even though the hallway was claustrophobically narrow.  
"I'm _sure_ you do. Right now your little brain is all confused and waking up." She chuckled mirthlessly. "Probably the last thing you remember is dying. That can't be fun. I've heard about prisoners going mad from that." Her grin could cut glass. "But through this door is only _good_ things, you demented little _twerp_. My tax dollars are paying for your regrown muscles." She shoved him through the opening without effort. "So sit down, chill out, and let the chair do its work. We'll be back in 24 hours." The door was shut without fanfare and he was once again alone.

The room was bare again except for a reclining chair placed dead center and a framed abstract artwork that clung to the white walls like a canker sore. He stared menacingly at the chair, defiant, until his weakened legs gave out and he was forced to sit on the cold floor, leaning against the far wall. Why was he so feeble? Where was his magic? His power? His expansive mind? With his albeit tenuous memories, he was beginning to remember what it felt like to have the energy of the universe pulse at his fingertips. He pulled for it, but it had vanished utterly. He felt so alone, alien in his own skin.

"Hello Mr. Lawson." A smooth voice emanated from the wall he was propped against. Loki crawled away from the wall to sit, halfway between the wall and chair, the only space resembling safety in the tiny box-like room. "I'm sure you're a little disoriented right now, but rest assured, the commonwealth acknowledges you've served your time. There are no negative repercussions for you at this point." He was wary to answer.  
"And to whom am I speaking?" The wall lit up with a feminine face, clearly a projected illusion. Maybe one of those computers that Bruce was always talking about-

Bruce.

 _Norns_.

He remembered, his eyes growing wide. Thanos had killed him. Bruce had looked on, clearly distraught. Bruce was _still_ on that spaceship, being slowly tortured to death.

"I am Stella, the AI interface assigned to prisoner discharge." The computer voice interrupted his racing thoughts. "You have many questions. Let me answer them succinctly. You are Mr. Lawson, otherwise known as Prisoner 028E28. You have been incarcerated for 5 years, 45 days, and 2 hours. Your original sentence was 6 years 0 days for the crime of manslaughter comma racial and or ethnic associations. You were unexpectedly killed in situ during the term of your sentence. Therefore, by the laws of the commonwealth, you are not subject to be re-instated, but are released early. The conditions of your sentence are deemed to be met." His head was spinning with the onslaught of information. He was in prison, and he'd killed someone, and now he'd been killed, and he was free to go? It made no sense.  
" _Dark magic_ ," he snarled at the apparition. She - it only cocked its head. Loki wasn't about to award this foul spirit a gender.

"You have questions, please ask them. But first, please sit in the chair behind you."  
"I will do no such thing."  
"You'd be wise to take a seat. No harm will come to you. The commonwealth will rebuild your atrophied muscles. You've been in suspension for 5 years." He hesitated, but the apparition's logic was starting to make more sense. He couldn't do anything useful in his current condition. "It will not be without some discomfort, but you are only consuming time with your indecision. The sergeants will return in 23 hours and 48 minutes and your opportunity will be at an end." He hated being told what to do. But she/it was right. Begrudgingly, he pulled himself onto the seat and gingerly laid back.  
"Excellent choice, Mr. Lawson. Now, while the procedure is running, I will be happy to answer any questions you have."

With those words, the 'procedure' began. Precise pain pierced the middle of his back, then faded. Lightning shocks followed, flooding his body. Sharp and hot. The shocks were only startling at first, but when they continued unrelentingly, it became aggravating and difficult to focus. He gritted his teeth. Between the new information, his frail condition, and the electricity that pounded his nerves, he struggled with cogent thought.

"Five years makes no sense. I have no gaps in my memory that would account for that time."  
"Correct. Modern technology and the rising cost of incarceration makes Hypno-jail™ the most effective means of imprisonment. The need for correctional officers, solid food, exercise, and physical prison space has vanished. Instead, inmates spend their time in Hypno-jail™ where time passes at an accelerated rate, allowing for inmates to more fully reflect on their crimes and decreasing the incidence of recidivism."  
"Time passes faster?" Sweat was beading on his forehead from the punishing treatment.  
"Correct. At approximately the rate of 1 day per hour. In your case, roughly five thousand years have passed in Hypno-jail™. This is quite common for violent offenders."

 _Five thousand years._ But that meant...

" _Who_ am I?" Loki gasped.  
"You are Mr. Lucas Lawson, a male member of the commonwealth, now 36 years old. You were formerly a professor of coronal physics before you were convicted of the unlawful death of Mr Terrence Tate-Young. Your parents are both deceased: Mr Lawson and Ms Friedman. You have one brother, Theodore, who is division vice president of sales in QuantumCore Inc, creators of Hypno-jail™."

The information flooded over him like a tsunami. He felt faint, but whether it was from the shocks or the information, he couldn't be sure. His stomach revolted and he doubled over as far as he could while tethered through his back, retching nothing but bile onto the floor.

"Regurgitation is unwise, Mr Lawson. It will only decrease the efficiency of the procedure. We are feeding proteins and extracting waste through the renal ports on your lower back. I will add an anti-emetic now." Loki could feel the unnatural constriction of his esophagus. Disgusted as he was, vomiting was now the furthest thing on his mind. "Please try to relax."

It was too much to process, even for him. Loki took a few deep cleansing breaths through the unrelenting wave of electricity and tried to parse one piece of information out of the melee.  
"My brother. Can you show me his picture?" The computer stared back at him from the wall, calm and silent. Then it spoke.  
"Yes. We have accessed the public company records and obtained a 2D image." The apparition disappeared from the wall and a likeness appeared that had Loki's stomach re-tied in knots.

It was Thor. Or rather, it was what Thor would look like with his hair short, no mustache or beard, and wearing a sharp Midgardian suit and tie.  
"Still got both those eyes, _doesn't he_?" He grimaced. How was this possible? Which was the lie?! This false brother in front of him, or the one he'd grown up with on Asgard? It was stupefying.

"Alright," he had no more need of the image.  "Show me what my parents look - looked like. And when did they die?"  
The image sat frozen on Thor/Theodore's face for a few more seconds. Then it blurred and focused on a photo of what could easily have been a young Odin and an impossibly elderly Frigga. It was beyond uncanny.  
"Mr. Lawson died when you were 5 years of age in an employment-related accident. Ms. Friedman died 1 year and 15 days ago of natural causes."

 _Norns._ That was cruel fate, wasn't it? Frigga had died while he was in Asgard's dungeons and this woman - he struggled with the concept of mother despite her identical visage - had perished while he was in this particular prison. Cruel, cruel, fate! How did his life and this lie of 'Lucas Lawson' mirror each other so well? Tears welled up in his eyes unbidden. He refused to shed them, but the ongoing shocks penetrating his body betrayed him and a sole drop ran down his cheek. The images faded in front of his eyes.

"You are in emotional distress, Mr Lawson. I will administer a dose of fluvoxamine."  
" _No!_ " Loki bit out. "No, I don't want any of your tonics. I'm _not_ in emotional distress, I-I'm just digesting... all of the information." He had no idea what mixtures this THING was pumping into his body, but he was certain he needed fewer potions, not more. He needed to remain as clear-headed as he could be against this incorporeal adversary.

Only one question remained, and he bit his lip before starting.  
"Show me... show me Bruce Banner." The screen froze for a few moments as before, then an image he dreaded filled the wall.

It was Bruce. Exactly. Glasses, curly hair, deep brown eyes, impish grin: every bit the good Dr Banner.  
"How is this possible?" he whispered. But the computer witch heard it all.  
"Please restate your question." Loki hesitated a few more moments, clenching his jaw through the lightning shocks.  
"Where is Bruce Banner?"  
"Mr Banner is currently incarcerated." Suddenly the loquacious computer drew timid.  
" _Where_ is he prisoner? And for what? How long is his sentence? And... does this... dream state between prisoners overlap?" He tried to articulate as best he could, lacking the exact words to describe what he feared.

"Mr Banner is incarcerated in this facility. He was convicted of aggravated assault. His sentence is 21 days, 0 hours of which 9 days, 0 hours, and 18 minutes have elapsed. To conserve Hypno-jail™ processing resources, each instance hosts a maximum of 2,048 individuals." Loki's mind raced. Banner was in there. He wasn't dead yet, or this ephemeral watchman would have noted him as 'released'. Which meant he'd either somehow miraculously survived Thanos or the mad titan was currently picking him apart one molecule at a time in dream land, feasting on his screams. He HAD to get him out.

As the shocks ravaged his body, Loki thought back to the computer's sterile description of his long life. 5000 years had presumably passed in only 5.  
"At what rate does time progress in the dream-state?"  
"Each instance differs, but for all individuals in an instance, the rate is the same. Your experience was approximately 24 hours per 1 minute." Loki reached into a portion of his brain he didn't frequently use on Asgard. Maybe it was a vestige of his prior life. He quickly calculated that nearly an hour had passed since he was taken to this room. For Bruce, that would be almost two months. In another 23 hours when this infernal machine quit, he would be 4 years older. By the end of his 21 day term: if Thanos allowed him to live that long, he would be 82 years old. What would his mind be like? Would he even _last that long_ , mentally, under such conditions? He was only mortal, after all. Would his body be likewise ravaged when he awoke? That sergeant... she had mentioned prisoners losing their minds. He couldn't let that happen to Bruce. He _absolutely_ wouldn't. Each second that elapsed in this electric chair was 24 minutes for Bruce. He was running out of time. No, he HAD no time.

"This machine is doing nothing for me," he began, consciously forgetting about the sweat that dripped down his forehead. "My muscles are still as feeble as ever. I think it's defective."  
The face on the wall froze again, calculating in the background.  
"The procedure is proceeding at the standard rate. All components were inspected 2 cycles ago and showed no sign of error when used last."  
"I'm not sure what to tell you, but it's wrong. It's not working. You're going to release me in 24 hours as decrepit as I currently am." He gritted his teeth and continued, "You're wasting 'tax dollars' on me. Increase the output now or you'll deliver me back a poorer specimen than when I arrived. How would that appear?"  
The image hesitated again.  
"Hurry up! I'm growing bored and old from this pathetic massage."  
The image hesitated.  
"Increasing consumption by 20%."

Loki stifled a gasp as the frequency of the shocks increased. He relished in his small victory. He was still the Silvertongue, even pitted against a thoughtless machine.  
"Not nearly enough." He struggled to keep from panting. "Another 50%, at least. This is laughable."  
"Increasing consumption by 50%." Loki nearly threw up again despite the medicine flowing through his veins.  
"Another- another 50%." He spat, desperate.  
"Increasing consumption by 50%." Loki couldn't speak. He couldn't think. His mind was a blank of white pain. His vision blurred. His body spasmed with shocks, mindless and stupefied. He cried and drooled and lost control of his blessedly empty bladder. Seconds passed like hours. Minutes like eons. He was right back on Thanos' culling floor, fluids draining from his body, weeping for mercy. The face on the wall was silent now, watching Loki's misery impassively. His teeth ground together until he feared they would shatter. His nails dug into the arm rests in jagged crescent moons, breaking ragged down to the quick. He screamed, long and loud until his throat was raw.

The shocks abruptly ceased, but Loki was without sense. He continued screaming.  
"The procedure is not complete. We will administer 2 doses of clonazepam and then resume." That snapped Loki out of his reverie of misery.  
"No- no, I'm all- all- all good." He slouched to the side, trying to will his arms and legs to move off the chair. He was still anchored by his back.  
"Clearly, you are suffering from delusions and seizures. Please relax. I will administer the dosage and we will continue." Loki felt around his spine and found two pipes running into and under his skin. He clenched down on his jaw tightly and pulled. It felt as if long metal tubes were being slid out of his arteries. Perhaps it was the truth.

"Please do not tamper with the renal ports, Mr Lawson. Please sit back and we will resume the procedure."  
His fingers were covered in blood, but his back ached only mildly compared to his other woes. Loki stood, shakily. He was wobbly but he could already tell that he was stronger than before.  
"Mr Lawson. Please sit back in the chair and we will resume the procedure. Failure to do so will result in a fine for interruption of rehabilitative activities." A fine? Fancy threat, Loki thought as he moved to grab the artwork from the wall and smash it on the floor. The glass shattered. The only thing he had to ransom was himself.  
"Call the guards here, witch. Call them here, _now!_ " He drew a shallow red line across his own throat with the sharp edge of a shard. "Do not suffer from the delusion that I am not _deadly serious_." He operated best when he had a warm body to bargain with. This computer was cold, logical, and he could only deceive it to a certain limit. The face on the wall faded.

  
ALERT ALERT ALERT

  
The lights dimmed bloody red inside the white room and Loki was certain they were coming in with Midgardian-like vision-augmenting apparatuses. He no longer had the benefit of his enhanced Jotun eyesight or his magic, so he flattened himself against the wall to one side of the door. Two pairs of heavy boots beat against the ground and stopped just outside the door. Good. Maybe it was the two simpletons from before. If fate smiled warmly on him.

The door burst open and the big man flew inside first. Five thousand years of hand to hand combat training kicked in and Loki wrapped himself around his torso, pulling him off-center with his weight. As the man fell, Loki felt for a soft spot in his armor. In fact, there was no armor covering his neck. He jabbed the glass into and out of his jugular, cutting a ragged path.  Loki sprang back to his feet before the man hit the floor.

Before the woman could react, he rolled forward, timing his momentum to kick out her legs. In the span of a breath he had her face pressed to the floor. Loki sat astride her and forced her jaw open with the butt of one hand while the other shoved the dagger of glass into her mouth.  
"If you wish to keep your tongue or your life, you'll do exactly what I say. No questions." In the dim red the light, he could see the fear in her eyes. She was not trained for this. There was no need to train her for this. All her wards were unconscious simpletons until the day they were released, and then ever-so-grateful for their return to society. This was a incomprehensible outcome. She made a noise of acquiescence, her eyes wide with fear.

Norns, it felt _so good_ to be feared. It was like a fine wine running through his veins. Loki grinned widely, removed the glass from her mouth, stood, and dragged her upright by her jacket, crushing her smaller body into the wall.  
"This is easy, trust me. So easy, that I couldn't _comprehend_ you messing it up in any way other than malicious spite. So, if anything does go awry, I will assume your impudence, not your incompetence, and gut you like an animal. Are we clear?" She nodded quickly. "Is that a yes?"  
"Y-yes, yes. I'm not going to cause trouble."  
"Excellent." He was all posh polish now. "I need to determine the location of a prisoner. In which cell is Mr Banner held?"  
"I-I don't know-" she started, and Loki raised the glass blade to the corner of her mouth. "I can find out!" He observed her as a hawk would a rodent.  
"Please don't hesitate to elaborate."  
"It's, it's- I've got to get to the records access on another floor."  
"Really," he deadpanned. "I would've thought you could ascertain his location through that metal pad you were fussing with earlier. Hmm?"  
"Uh, yeah, yeah I can use that." Loki leaned in even closer, if it was possible.  
" _What did I say_ about lying to me?" The words slithered out of his mouth, precision filling his voice with venom. Without another beat, he carved a thick line between the shell of her ear and her head. The blood dripped down his fingers while she cried out.

"So... how do you use that metal pad to find Banner?" He waited, glass pressed to her temple while she caught her breath. " _Show me_." He yanked her away from the wall far enough so she could fish the data terminal from her jacket.  
"What-what was his name? Banner?"  
"Yes. Bruce. Bruce Banner." Her shaking fingers brushed over the surface of the terminal.  
"He's in cell 3A0." When she paused and didn't elaborate, he lifted her off her feet and crushed her into the wall again. "I-it's three floors down from here."  
"Lovely. Do be so kind as to show me."

A communication device crackled at her shoulder.  
"Sergeant Petrov, confirm your 'sitch." Alas, this was bound to happen.  
"Tell them the prisoner is under control," he instructed coolly. "Tell them the computer acted strangely. However you need to make it work. Say it." She moved her hand hesitantly to her shoulder to reply.  
"Command, Sergeant Petrov. The prisoner is under control," she hesitated. Loki tightened his grip. "Sergeant Bort is critically injured! The prisoner-" he crushed her forehead into the wall twice. Vile peasant! Her unconscious body slumped to the ground.

Cell 3A0. Three floors down. Bor's Teeth, he prayed the information was accurate. Every second, another 24 minutes for Bruce. Every minute, another day. He grabbed the communication device from her shoulder and a long black oblong device attached to the belt of each guard. He assumed they were weapons. He would figure it out later. He saved one thought for removing the smaller guard's jacket, and then burst into the hallway. The device crackled again.  
"Sergeant Petrov, confirm? Bort is injured?"

Good. They were unused to this sort of situation. Prisoners did not revolt here. It would take them longer to regroup and find him.  
"Sergeant Petrov? Petrov, come in." He would find Bruce first.

He ran down the narrow corridor barefoot, past dozens of doors that looked identical. They were all numbered in the same odd fashion. 71B, 71A, 719, 718... he kept running. 705, 704, 703... finally an end and presumably a staircase. He paused, listening. He had never wished for his Jotun ears before, but he did now. Nothing, as far as he could tell. He flew down the circular stairwell: one, two, three and paused at the door marked 300. Again, he listened, but nothing. He cautiously opened the door onto a similarly abandoned hallway. He began to run.

301, 302, 303... his legs began to fatigue, unused to the effort. 338, 339, 33A... There were so many rooms. Each filled with another unfortunate soul? 36D, 36E, 36F... This was disgusting. Thousands of people trapped in their own minds, living out false identities, given false lives. 398, 399, 39A... His lungs were bursting, his legs cramping up.

3A0

Still no one was around, and no sound other than his own jagged breathing. Loki threw open the door and shut it swiftly behind him. The room was the same as he remembered his own. White, empty, save for a huge pod in the center of the floor. However, there were photos pasted on the wall opposite the pod.

Bruce: a big grin on his face, in some colorfully decorated room. And there were others in the photos too. Most people occupied only one or two photos, but a woman occupied several. Curly brown hair, tender smile. Arms wrapped around Bruce's shoulders. Some photos just of her, alone, smiling through the camera at the photographer, eyes brimming with love.

Loki's heart sank. Bruce was happy here. That was a good thing, right? He had friends, and family, and love. He would have no need of Loki. It was a stupid, selfish thought, but he entertained it regardless. Loki, 'Mr Lawson' rather, had no one. A brother doubtlessly at odds, parents gone, no photos adorning his cell. No one waiting for him to return. He'd come _so close_ , on that awful ship. So close to some insane semblance of contentment. He cursed his mortal body's failings when his eyes grew tight in advance of unshed tears.

Oh but Bruce... Bruce had a hope, and a future. And he was only in here for 21 days anyway. A far cry from the 5 years Loki had been awarded.

He gritted his teeth. This was utter nonsense! 21 days equated to _decades_ of relentless torture: be it Thanos, or the Midgardian government, or by virtue of his own green incubus festering inside of him. He had to set him free, he _owed_ him that, even if... even if it meant he would not be Loki's in the end.

 

***

  
*****

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Still here? I hope you're not crushed with disappointment at the plot twist.  
> Honestly, I had no idea the connection with Inception when I wrote it. Then I saw a Rick and Morty episode and I was like... oh crud.  
> Stick around... Bruce is coming next chapter!


	16. Chapter 16

Muscles slightly rested, Loki braced himself against the wall and pushed on the lid of the pod. It provided only a modicum of resistance before it slid to one side and toppled off. Bruce lay inside, floating in the liquid like the dead. Loki didn't know how to terminate the system, so he did the only think he could think of and slipped the mask off of Bruce's head. And waited, holding his breath.

Seconds ground past, heavy and immovable. Bruce's chest moved up and down slowly. He was breathing, at least. Should he wake him? Would he wake on his own? His own experience was nothing to go by. He debated waking or watching and while cornered by his own indecision, Bruce's eyes started to flutter open. Loki held his breath. It was a frightening thing, like watching a baby being born. Would everything be alright? Would the world get spun upside-down? Bruce's eyes gradually focused. First on the ceiling directly above him, and then on Loki. His gaze struck him in place.

"Bruce?" he timidly asked.  
"L-Loki?" The trickster's mouth split in a wide grin and he released the breath he was holding.  
"Gods, yes, it's me. How are you feeling?" The smaller man continued to visually inspect his surroundings and his naked body, floating in the pod.  
"Like... like... someone decided to use my head as a wrecking ball?" Loki's face fell in remembrance. "No, no, sorry - that's a bad metaphor. I mean, I feel _like shit_. My god, you're alive. How are you alive?! Where am I?"  
"You're not going to believe this, but it's better we get you out of there while I tell it." He offered an arm, and Bruce took it gratefully. "We have apparently been in a dream-state. For... _quite_ some time. I did not die, I just... woke up?" Bruce sat up, waist-deep in the liquid. His eyes focused on Loki's, holding him fast.

"Oh my god, you _died_ right in front of me. It was horrific. There wasn't anything I could do. Thank god - thank god you're alright." The horror was etched into his wide eyes, and he reached up a hand to cup Loki's face, to make sure he was real.

"Did you make it out?" It was the question Loki had been dying to ask.  
"Yes, yes, but just barely. They had to restart my heart- well Hulk's heart. We lost so many people in that fight." His eyes grew distant, remembering the carnage. "Thanos... he was so strong. We _couldn't_ stop him. The best we could do was contain him. Selvig was there, Jimmy was there. They-they didn't make it. We chained Thanos to a black hole... the heart of Messier 33 actually. It SHOULD hold him, but, but there's no guarantee. My god, Loki! So many people died..." he trailed off, grief-stricken eyes distracted, catching on the photos on the wall. Loki's heart dropped to his stomach as he watched Bruce search, uncertain.

"Um, _that_ \- that is... apparently your life. Your actual life." Bruce stared for a long moment, studying the faces.  
"Who are they?"  
"I don't know either. I would assume your family and friends. Norns, I'm so glad you're alright." He stood, gesturing Bruce to do the same with his help. Thankfully Bruce was much stronger after his meager 9 days than Loki had been after 5 years, and even though he was clearly a little unbalanced, he had no problem getting out and walking around. He ignored both Loki's words and his own nudity and walked to the wall, touching the photos reverently with his fingertips.

"My life?"  
"Yes. This place... this is a prison, Bruce. We are inmates, convicted. Our lives: Thanos, Asgard, the Tesseract, Midgard - all of it, was a fantasy built so they could _'rehabilitate'_ us." Bruce's head flashed towards his, panic in his eyes. "I know, I know - I don't want to believe it either. But my magic..." he snapped his fingers, "is completely gone. Is-is your green monster still there? Can you feel him?" Bruce's eyebrows knitted together while he directed his focus inwards. The shock on his face was all the answer Loki needed.  
"Oh my god."  
"Truly."

The two men stood in silence for a long minute, internally mourning the lives, friends, experiences that had molded them and were now as ephemeral as a dewdrop. Their loving mothers, damaged fathers, triumphs, travails, enemies and friends. All smoke and mirrors.

"Is - is there at least some clothing around here?" Bruce broke the silence. Norns, he was a simpleton. Bruce was undoubtedly cold. He shrugged off the jacket he'd stolen from the guard and handed it to the other man belatedly.   
"I wasn't sure if I'd find you. All I have is this."  
"Are-are we fugitives?" Loki bit his lip. Oh god, how to explain.  
"I think so. Bruce, please forgive me. I didn't know if Thanos was torturing you and I couldn't bear to leave you in that state. I know _precisely_ what that's like, and I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy, let alone..." he trailed off, catching his admission before it was too late. Oh hell, it was already too late. "...let alone you. I-Bruce... I made the decision to pull you out and _yes_... I'm pretty sure there are people looking for us because of it."

He listened to the intervening silence in the hallway as Bruce processed.  
"At least we have a head start. They're after me, but the only person who knows I was looking for you is a guard I concussed." Bruce winced at the admission of violence. "Once she wakes up, we've lost. We should move now while we can." Bruce nodded enthusiastically, but his eyes drifted back to the wall of photos.  
"I know... I know these people must be really important to me, but - but I can't remember any of them." His remaining words hung in the air between them unspoken. He had Loki. That was enough, for now. "Let's find me some pants and let's get the hell out of Dodge." Loki smiled sharply.  
"Yes, sir, Dr Banner, sir." He stood straighter, a thin smile curling his lips. "Allow me to lead the way."

All the door numbers started with a 3. Loki surmised they were 3 floors above ground. It would make sense for their captors to keep the short-term prisoners on the bottom and the long-term convicts on the top. For efficiency. Gods, that's all that computer had talked about. The _'efficiency'_ of their cruel system. So Loki guided them quietly down the corridor and into the stairwell. So far, no one stirred. They reached level 1. Beneath them was level 0, and beneath that, nothing. Loki opened the door to level 1 slowly, reaching out with his dulled senses as best he could. No one. This was beginning to unnerve him. All of the doors were numbered in the same pattern as before.

"Hexadecimal," Bruce breathed. "How curious. It makes me wonder... what year this is."  
"I would leave all of your suppositions at the threshold, Banner. We are in undiscovered country."  
They reached a door without a number which suddenly opened in front of them. A uniformed woman shuffled out, carrying what Loki assumed was the prison equivalent of cleaning paraphernalia. Before she could scream, Loki wrapped one arm around her neck in a choke hold, the other smothering her mouth.  
" _Not. One. Word._ " He dragged her back into the open door, blessedly the equivalent of a storage compartment. He held her nose and mouth closed with his fingers while she struggled.  
"Loki! What the hell?" He glared at Bruce but didn't relent until the woman sagged in his arms, unconscious.  
"That was the most benign thing I could have done. Snapping her neck would have been much more effective. Stop complaining."  
"Jesus christ."  
"Take her pants, hopefully they'll fit you." Loki perused the closet while Bruce covered his naked lower half.

He searched hastily for something they could use to help secure their exit from the building. His eyes passed over bottles of cleaning solution, mop handles, spray cans, sponges, metal canisters...  
"Here," Bruce held his hand outstretched towards Loki. His thin eyebrows creased as he inspected the small object.  
"What is it?"   
"A hair tie. It's the cleaning lady's. I think you need it more than she does right now. Have you _seen_ your hair?" His face was amused, the barest hint of a smile threatening to escape. Loki took the green elastic and tied his hair back messily. He hadn't seen a mirror yet, but his hands told him it was much longer than before, cascading down his back. "How long have we been here, honestly? That's several years of hair growth, I would bet."  
"Five, actually," Loki murmured, resuming his search for equipment.  
" _Five years?_ I don't know whether to be shocked we were here so long or surprised our whole lives can be summed up so quickly." Bruce shook his head in disbelief.

"It was closer to 9 days for you." Bruce gagged on a half-breath.  
"What?!"  
"They apparently speed time in their nightmare prison. Some vile form of magic...," he muttered disdainfully.

Loki stopped fast, as if struck.   
"Norns, why didn't I think of this? I took these off the guards." Loki pulled the two oblong instruments from his pants pocket, handing one to Bruce. "I think they're weapons." He inspected his closely, testing its black heft, striking out with it clenched in his fist. He waved it back and forth, thinking to throw it in the air. Instead, he snapped it in the air like a baton. A bright curve of orange electricity streaked out, crackling and tearing through a shelf and several jugs of cleaner. The cut was clean and liquid cascaded to the floor. The orange tongue disappeared back into the device as quickly as it had leapt out, leaving no trace.  
"Well now. That's _helpful_ ," he murmured, his eyes alight. Finally, a sliver of power. He could feel the joy slithering through his veins.

Bruce held the other device out at arm's length.  
"I don't know how you did that, but I don't want to accidentally cut my own arm off. Here." Loki snatched up the offered baton too quickly, his mouth curved into a smile. "Please don't make me regret giving it back to you," Bruce murmured belatedly.  
"Nonsense, dear doctor. This is our ticket out of here. Now I know exactly what to do with those canisters." He set both weapons down regretfully and picked up a roll of tape. "I have an idea."

 

***

 

Ten minutes later the cleaning woman was starting to wake up, but they had already bound her hands and taped her mouth shut. They crept out into the hallway, Bruce first, his hands in the air in mock surrender, similarly bound. No one was there, but Loki could hear approaching feet. He gripped the back of Bruce's neck, prompting the shorter man to keep his hands up. Loki flattened himself against the wall with Bruce as a human shield as a squad of four guards erupted from the stairwell door.

"Not one more step!," he bellowed. "This man is my hostage. Any closer and I sever his neck." The guards were clearly unused to dealing with belligerent inmates. In an uncoordinated group packed together in the narrow hallway, they bounced from one foot to another, all nervous energy and indecision. "You think I jest?! I just languished in this _desolate hell_ for five years." They failed to react, locked in place by lack of experience and leadership. Loki chuckled, low and dark, in a manner practiced over millennia. "Or do you wish to test your mettle with mine? _Delightful_. I've got absolutely nothing to lose." His pathologic laughter made a shiver run down Bruce's back despite knowing full well it was all for show.

"Fall back to ground floor," one murmured to the rest and they shuffled in reverse through the door. It swung shut behind them.

"Incompetency. At least it's working in our favor," Loki whispered. "Let's move." Bruce shook himself out of his fearful trance, easily tore the single layer of tape holding his wrists together and picked up one gas cylinder tucked behind the storage door. The two men dashed down the corridor as quickly as they could. Loki cracked the door open, unsurprised to see the squad of men had increased in the stairwell below. But from his vantage point their numbers were ambiguous: clustered around the bottom one floor below.

"Back into the hallway!" he screamed. "Are you _deaf?!_ "  Bruce continued to play the hostage.  "I'll rip off one of his ears if it will make you feckless scuts obey!" They shuttled slowly but determinedly out of the stairwell, door closing once again behind them. Loki cast one eye upwards, but it appeared no one was waiting to descend upon them. The two men moved out to the stairs, carrying their equipment downwards.

They stood by the door again, Bruce in front, Loki's hand resting at the small of his back.  
"Are you ready?" he murmured. Bruce felt a bead of sweat roll down his forehead. This was _suicide_. The guards had been strangely accommodating so far, but how much longer before they caught on to their charade?

"No.  But..."  Bruce sighed in frustration.  "Let's do this," he swallowed around his words. Loki crooked his head to one side, catching Bruce's earlobe with his nose.   
"I've got you. Just keep up that _lovely_ level of fear and this will be easy." He paused to kiss the space between his cheekbone and ear, admiring the smooth sheen of sweat on his skin. "Norns, you're delicious when you're panicked." Bruce grumbled wordlessly, and Loki chuckled through his own shrouded anxiety. "Alright, let's go." Bruce opened the door in front of them with his hands together, appearing to be re-bound. Loki shifted his hand from Bruce's back to grip his neck and they gazed out on at least ten guards now in tight phalanx formation, riot helmets down. They were multiplying and gaining leadership. Neither was a good portent.

"Get back! I want a clear path down this corridor or I start slicing him up!" The figure just behind the center spoke up, and Loki's pocket echoed simultaneously in tinny mockery.  
"You're not fooling anyone anymore, Mr Lawson. We know you are affiliated with Mr Banner. You pose as little threat to him as you do to us." The communicator in his pocket broadcast her surety in stereo.

Loki reacted quickly, body new and green, but muscle memory sharpened over eons. He released his grip on Banner and the smaller man let himself fall to his knees, making a smaller target. Loki snapped the baton open, uncurling the electric blade and kicking over the gas cylinder as he sliced open one end. It torpedoed away from the two men into the crowd of guards, covering the violence of its impact with the walls, men's legs, faces, in a cloud of condensing fog.

Loki was a blur of movement, feeling incandescent rage fuel his movements. A baton in each hand, he watched as the weapons grew to their full potential at the end of his swinging arms. The arcs scraped across the ceiling, lapping at the walls, at boots too slow to move, at hands poking out from the roiling cloud. It was close combat in the tight space and screams of shock and pain filled the air. He advanced and they fell back. He didn't stop to cast a glance back at Bruce, he wouldn't waste precious seconds.  Loki kept the helicopter cascade moving forward with deadly intent. He was _getting out_ of here. They were _both_ getting out of here. These villains had robbed him of his life, even if it was one of disappointment and pain, it was his! Asgard, his mother, his ambition, his magic, his power, his Bruce. Was it all just a figment of a dream?!

The fury propelled him onwards even as the smoke started to dissipate. Bruce was indeed behind him and like clockwork he stripped the first aerosol can from the makeshift tape bandolier crossing his chest, rolling it in front of Loki. The erstwhile god licked it with the tip of one of his electric whips and it burst into flames as it rolled forward.

Luck was on their side. The corridor bent at 90 degrees and all but one of the guards had retreated around it, cradling injuries that trailed blood down the floor. Loki snared the lone guard who was clutching one injured arm. He lifted the baton to his neck like a dagger and the guard froze in place. Loki spared a moment to pause and lock eyes with Bruce, catching their breath behind the natural shelter afforded by geometry.

"I _meant_ what I said. I want this corridor clear or I start taking more than fingers, toes, and egos!" The response was just shuffling bodies and occasional cries of pain. Bruce ventured a look around the corner with a bit of mirror salvaged from the storage closet. The guards were loosely grouped and less than half their number were still on their feet. "What's your name, solider?" Loki inquired sharply.  
"Alvarez, p-please don't kill me!"  
"I want the corridor clear! _Licked clean._ And transportation away from here for me, Banner, and my new friend Alvarez. Are we understood?!"

His demands were only met with confused silence.

 

***

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Will Loki and Bruce get out of this one? And if they do, what awaits them?  
> What about the brunette in Bruce's photos? Is this all going to end in tragedy?  
> New chapter, up soon!


	17. Chapter 17

Stellan wasn't at all amused by the clog created on his way back from today's Photon Absorption repair site to his dwelling. Most 'days', traffic flowed well, no peak times due to the trackless sidereal cycle created by the lack of shielding. The transport pods flowed right along, on their merry, friction-free way. But today, something had happened. Some jackass had mucked things up and now he and dozens of other workers, children, bureaucrats, and the like were stalled out waiting for the influx of volume to dissipate.

 _Spots!_ He hated being delayed. Every second felt like an eternity wasted. He was due back to his home, where his wife and child were growing ever out of sync with his own circadian cycle. He worked hard, he was _smart_ , he was a valuable person - why should he have to wait like this?!

He was readying his hand to punch the pod console in front of him when another pod sped past, quick as a flare. He barely caught the glimpse of three bodies, huddled like cargo, all staring wide-eyed with fear. He couldn't possibly decipher the source: whether it was born of speed, or the euphoria from clinching an illegal scheme, or at some other internal conflict. He couldn't possibly know that in the case of two of the three men, it was at the sheer surprise of the unknown world around them. The slick surface over which their pod glided at stunning speeds... the organization of people all stopped, gawking at their procession... the enormity of the curving world that expanded in front of them like some inverted horizon... or the white burning star that hung, scorching brilliant, _impossible_ to ignore, over their heads like the ire of ancient demons, confidently stalking its hapless prey in unshadowed brilliance.

The light was _everywhere_. Loki could not fail to grasp how close they were to the star that sat above their heads, menacing and boiling. It felt like a crushing and inevitable doom, waiting on some petulant executioner to finally spill their blood. He turned toward Bruce, what little he could while keeping the baton close to the throat of their hostage.

"What in Bor's name is that?!" He knew full well it was a sun, but his cogent mind and his panic would not align.  
"I-I don't know, but I think... we're inside of... something... like a Dyson Sphere?" Bruce's eyes gazed around in wonder, not in fear. Loki couldn't seem to swap the one for the other. "It's _amazing_. How was it built? How are we even able to look at it? Beautiful..." he trailed off, wistfully.

Their hostage, Alvarez, began to chuckle and Loki reminded him of his precarious position by pressing the baton menacingly against his windpipe.  
" _What's so funny?!_ " he shrieked.  
"You two..." he gasped both for breath and with the humor that tinged his eyes red. Or maybe that was the lack of oxygen. "You have no idea where you are? You have no idea what's going on? You're like two _children_ first learning about the world." Loki snarled at his impudence.

"How dare you, you feckless fieldshrike! I ought to rip your _spine_ through your _mouth_." But his wonder did not abate. "What is that? Where are we? Speak fast or lose your tongue, creature."  
"That's the sun! Solar Prime 1! Amun-Ra, Helios, Amaterasu, whatever you like... Center of our system. Holy moly, man. That Hypno-jail™ really did a number on your cerebrum..." he chuckled again, unwary of his own peril.

"Bruce.  You said you knew where we were? How?" He turned his wild eyes on the curly-haired man, much calmer than his companions.  
"I _think_ it's a Dyson Sphere. It was theorized in the 20th century. The most efficient means of utilizing 100% of the energy of a star." Bruce turned to their captive. "This is a hollow bubble habitat, orbiting the sun. Right?" The guard winked and clicked his tongue in acknowledgement.

"When you're right, you're right. Kid, you two are a bunch of knuckleheads. You've got a good 15 minutes of freedom and then you're caught again. Enjoy and catch some rays while you can." Loki growled, infuriated. He moved the baton from the man's neck and slammed the blunt end to the back of his head as hard as he could. Alvarez stuttered and collapsed unconscious to the bottom of the tiny pod, still hurtling along at impossible speeds.

"I think he's right, Loki. We're running on borrowed time." Bruce gestured around the pod windows. "We are both in a _totally_ alien environment, uncertain where we are headed, unable to drive or navigate this contraption, and we've just left a raft of injured prison guards in our wake." Loki seemed to snap out of his reverie suddenly, buoyed by Bruce's voice and perversely centered by the violence he'd wrought on their hostage.

"When has that ever stopped us? I cut my teeth on a myriad of strange worlds. You've faced down immortal foes. We're skimming the skin of a bubble around Midgard's star?" He tossed his head back and laughed. Bruce thought he was mad. "They're going to have to do better than that to take us down." He grinned wolfishly and grabbed what he assumed were the controls.   
It was Bruce's turn to panic.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> When I said slow burn, I meant it. More fun next chapter. ;)


	18. Chapter 18

Through many scattered oaths to the Norns and some truly spectacular odds, Loki and Bruce found themselves far from the prison, in a covered passageway, trading their pilfered pod for another. They left Alvarez behind, just barely unconscious, and cast their lot in another random direction. Always change vehicles. It was as true on Midgard and Asgard as it was on this foreign sphere.

It only took another hour or so for Loki's mortal brain to show severe signs of fatigue. Bruce took the controls from him and continued on, but regardless both men knew they'd have to stop soon. They'd watched the clean glossy surfaces and buildings near the prison turn to a more humble white environment that whispered domesticity and back again to gloss and bureaucracy. They were moving from one centrum to another. For simply that reason, their new craft would probably be flagged as an anomaly and inspected by whatever governing body managed transportation in this realm. The time to stop and regroup was nigh. But they knew nothing of this civilization, including where they could steal away undetected for sustenance and rest.

Just as the thought was crossing between their minds, the expanse outside the pod windows changed again, showing a grey unornamented landscape of battered and painted boxes. Industrial. Maybe there was some relative semblance of shelter here for them after all.

Bruce guided the craft into a covered passageway and released the controls, his shoulders relaxing in a great sigh.  
"Shall we?" Loki had one hand on the pod door release. They were out and shuffling through the narrow corridors that doubled as both streets and alleyways, putting some distance between them and the pod, trying to stay out of sight of other citizens and find an opening in one of these puzzling 'buildings'.

This was an impossible terrain, masses of low buildings stacked on top of each other like a child's game of blocks, no shadows to hide in from the burning sun. Some were larger than warehouses, while most were small and unobtrusive. They reached to diverse heights and only occasionally did one belch forth workers. Bruce sidled up to one such door, waving his hand casually in front of it thinking some motion activation present.  Pressing in random locations to try and gain access. But there were no buttons or knobs or hinges or sensors or anything familiar.

"It's probably opened by an access tag or card. We're not going to have any luck here. Let's head back."  
Bodies rounded the corner of the alleyway and adrenaline flooded Loki's veins. He pulled both he and Bruce around the opposite corner and out of sight, dressed as they were in prison garb.  
"I don't think that's an option. We've got to regroup and plan. If we keep running like deer, we'll be snared." Voices got closer and while the rational side of both of their minds said these were probably workers and posed no threat, neither man took the chance, sprinting to the next intersection and dashing around the corner.

No one. The buildings were even less loved in this next section. The omnipresent hum of electricity and machinery that went unnoticed was suddenly lessened. Their eyes searched frantically. Were these buildings vacant? They jogged along, the last of their energy on the ragged edge of empty.

There! A door that wasn't quite sealed shut. Loki wedged his fingers into the crack afforded and pulled. Bruce did likewise and slowly the door began to slide outwards. The hum of a pod approaching filled their ears. They both renewed their effort in earnest and the door opened far enough for both men to slip through into the darkness within. Loki yanked the door shut just as the pod passed by, crushing his fingers in the jamb for his efforts. He stifled an angry cry and doubled over, curling his hands protectively into himself.

"Loki!" Bruce was by his side, sliding down the wall to meet him, seated on the floor. "Are you okay?"  
" _Bor's arse!_ I cut my fingers in the sodding door." Bruce cautiously bid him unclench his fists.  He could see by the wane light in the building that the cut was deep, but thankfully not through to the bone. There was blood dripping down his knuckles. Bruce pulled his jacket over his head, tearing off a sleeve and shredding it into two long strips. He began to tie them tightly around Loki's hands as the other man sucked in air, trying to manage the new pain blossoming.  
"We don't have any antiseptic or any supplies. Hopefully in the future, there aren't any microbes..." He tied each bundle neatly only to watch the blood beneath slowly spot the surface of the cloth.   
"I could _easily_ heal this scratch with my magic. How utterly dismal it is to be mortal."  
"Sorry, Loki. Just hold still and it should clot soon." Bruce rested against the metal wall and the demi god, still fuming, eventually followed suit.

The two men sat in silence for a minute before Bruce let out a long, deep breath. The anxiety in the darkened room faded away and Loki felt his own shoulders droop, finally at rest, however timorous. They gazed at each other after a long minute, faint smiles daring to curl the edges of their lips. The smiles grew to grins, to chuckles, to laughter spilling down their cheeks in bewildered tears.

"What the fuck, Loki? Really." Words staggered between gasping breaths.  
"I'm at a loss for words for the first time in _eons_." The despair of their situation and adrenaline of their flight had departed, and now all they could do was giggle insensibly. "I guess the last thing I remember was being on a vessel in space. It's fitting that we find ourselves in a similar situation."  
"The last thing I remember was listening to another one of Fury's overbearing speeches about fighting for the good ol' U.S. of A. against an army of mutant freedom fighters. I was toying with the idea of grabbing his eyepatch and shoving it down his self-righteous throat." That set Loki off into another din of giggles.   
  
"I would post a hefty reward to see that." As they continued to laugh, they relaxed further, shoulders touching and enjoying the shared proximity.  
"How is _this_ the world? Honestly? I'm reeling from 21st century New York to god-knows-what century sphere around _the sun_."  
"And how odd that we would be cell-mates in that infernal dungeon." Loki locked eyes with the shorter man, surprised at how close their noses were, but not daring to move an inch in any direction. "Forgive me for pulling you out. When I learned you were not a figment of that dream-state, but another prisoner, I felt compelled to release you. Whatever the cost, it was less than the horror Thanos could have put you through..." he trailed off, memories like spikes piercing his skin. "But this...? This is _too strange_. I am truly sorry." He pulled his eyes away, ashamed at admitting painful memories, his current powerlessness, and his attachment to the other man in one fell swoop.

Bruce didn't hesitate, plucking his chin where it pointed downcast at the floor with soft fingers and pressing their lips together delicately. He held onto Loki, spilling reassurance in waves through his fingertips and their tenuous connection, his warm bottom lip plucked from its resting place to be massaged and sucked.

Now Loki truly melted, the strings holding his frame cut, shoulders limp and boneless. His head fell back against the wall, all energy and will to fight evaporated. His bandaged hands spilled from his lap to the floor as Bruce knelt over him, now cradling Loki's face in both of his hands, kissing him slowly and deeply. His surrender was intoxicating, and Bruce couldn't help but devour him. Their tongues mixed steadily, greedy for the other in their slow, wet dance. He ran his hands up through Loki's long locks, impossibly soft and slightly damp from sweat. His heart was tight in his chest. There was such trust in the other man. _Where_ had it come from? He pondered as he continued to explore his mouth, steadily working himself into new levels of passion. This would-be conqueror, self-styled god, petulant prisoner, deceitful torturer, wounded son, self-destructive warrior, was now mewling in his lap like a sad puppy, drinking in any scraps of affection Bruce deigned to give him.

He renewed his efforts and straddled Loki's lap, clasping his shoulders while he kissed down his exposed neck. Deep green eyes were flickering shut, despite his best efforts to keep some semblance of control.   
"Bruce..." he whispered, delirious. He mourned for his old life, his power, his control, his immortality, but at the same time, being reborn into this new world was a tempting chance to paint himself anew. Under Bruce's hands and lips, he was ready to try and mold a truer version of himself, unfettered by old rivalries and vengeance. A flush crept across his chest, tightening his heart and flooding his body with heat. It was suddenly too warm in this cold mechanical box, and he groaned a wordless instruction to the other man to remove his shirt. Bruce carefully lifted it over his head, mindful of his damaged hands.

There was no need for words between the two of them now. They were of one mind and Bruce felt more alive and real than he had for the past fifteen years. He didn't have to cower in fear of the Hulk, worried with every accelerating beat of his heart that he would be possessed and lose control. No, instead he was losing control of his own volition. He was a man, or a beast, but he was entirely Bruce and he made quick work of his own pants, kissing down Loki's smooth stomach to the waistband that was swiftly undone. He took Loki in his mouth, relishing in the gasps like hiccups that spilled from the raven haired man's mouth. He held himself up by one hand while slowly working himself with the other, stroking back and forth in time with his mouth covering Loki's cock.

They were both exploring these new bodies for the first time and though dramatically like their dream-state counterparts, there was something new and fresh about each touch, each kiss. The way Bruce's fingers gripped Loki's hips as he devoured his flesh. The heat of his mouth, the smoothness of the insides of his cheeks, the devil tongue that stroked and explored. And the growing need at the base of his spine to be fucked wide open.

"Bruce..." he tried his voice again. " _Please_..." The other man pulled off just long enough to catch Loki's eyes, painted vibrantly with a boundless need he couldn't name. His own hand steadied, stroking lazily, the pattern lost. He tried puzzling the answer out through the sheer force of his own gaze, but failed.  
"Are you okay?"  
"Norns, yes, but... I _want_ you." He was panting now, chest beaded in sweat from their efforts and his own anticipation. "I want you in me. I want you... _fucking me_... senseless. Please." His entreaty was superfluous, and they both knew it. Bruce's pupils were blown wide and it seemed every drop of blood in his body raced to his erection in response. He wasted no time switching tactics and positions, easing Loki to the floor, teasing his firm thighs wide open with his tongue and positioning his own cock near Loki's mouth.   
"Lick me. I'll return the favor." Bruce was terse and to the point and wasted no time dropping his wide, flat tongue to Loki's pucker and laving it warmly. Loki was glad he hadn't reacted quickly as his chest and jaw now clenched rigidly from the onslaught of sensation. All of his nerves were on fire. Bruce was so eager and had begun teasing lightly around the rim, driving him to the edge. His whole body tensed in the absence of being able to grasp onto anything. He wanted to reciprocate and suckle the wide, blunt cock hanging in front of his face, but he was barely holding onto lucidity as the edges of orgasm crept in.

Bruce could feel his reaction where his legs framed the other man's torso and he paused, turning to watch the gorgeous sight of Loki's control failing. But it couldn't end like this.  
"Sssh," he carded his fingers through his hair. "Want me to take it slower?"  
"P-please," was all he could manage. Bruce re-positioned himself while Loki's breathing slowed. He kissed up and down his thighs, slowly massaging his fingers into the tense flesh. He could feel the other man relax again, and he was sure of his strategy when he felt the head of his cock enveloped in wet and warm and _wonderful_. Bruce struggled not to buck into Loki's mouth at the sensation. He remembered that mouth all too well after their months apart. Bruce resumed his own work kissing and licking steadily closer to Loki's entrance. It was an incredible feedback loop, tongue finally slipping inside and working the pale man open while his burning need swelled and filled Loki's eager mouth. He could come just like this, _god he was so tempted_. The pressure built and Bruce stopped at the last moment to pull gently free of that wet kiss and move to position himself between Loki's legs.

"Are you still okay with this?" He had to ask, but he begged it wouldn't be a no.  
" _Norns, yes._ What are you waiting for?" Bruce's face split into a grin.   
"Goddamn. I-", he started but quickly shut his mouth at the venomous look of impatience Loki was sending his way. He slipped each of Loki's legs over his shoulders, letting his knees hinge against his neck, his long thighs flush to Bruce's chest. A little extra saliva wouldn't hurt and Bruce prepared each of them before slowly sliding the head of his cock inside Loki's tight hole. His mind blanked at the feeling and he could tell Loki was similarly impaired, his head falling back against the floor once again and his erection throbbing in response.

Bruce slowly began to move deeper while grasping Loki with slick fingers, keeping the pace for both of them. The taller man's chest rose and fell frantically as he reveled in the feeling of being possessed completely. Bruce soon found his pace and had abandoned Loki's cock to brace himself against the floor with both hands. Loki gripped himself instead with one bandaged hand on either side of his cock, palms providing friction. It was a memory Bruce was sure would be painted in his brain forever. Loki's too long jet black hair, fighting against the green hair tie, spilling over the floor. Fingers of low light in the abandoned building playing over his smooth white skin, chest heaving. Lips parted and jaw wide open, sucking in air to try and keep up with the sensations wracking his mortal brain. Eyes tightly closed, forehead creased in passion. And his whimpers now of "Bruce, please. _Harder_ , please." It was too much. He was so hot and tight and willing and it had been far, _far_ too long for Bruce. He gripped the legs embracing his neck and violently spent himself inside Loki, biting his own lip to keep from screaming.

When Bruce regained some sense of reality, he'd found Loki had spilled across his own stomach in glorious ribbons of white. He was slowly catching his breath and lay limp and spent. He couldn't be more gorgeous if he tried. Bruce regretfully pulled out, laid Loki's legs on the floor, and curled up next to him.

Bliss. Truly.

"My kingdom for a blanket and a towel." The Midgardian reference was lost on Loki, but he chuckled breathlessly all the same. Bruce covered them with their discarded clothing. The mess would dry at least. They both fell into exhausted sleep.

 

  
***


	19. Chapter 19

In the back of their minds, they both knew the favor they'd found at the Fates' discretion would be short lived. Even so, when they woke at first, they were alone. The cold floor drank their combined body heat greedily and they woke shivering, donning the prison garb as quickly as they could. Bruce struggled into his pants and a scrap of paper fell to the floor. Loki's eyes didn't lock onto it, but he glanced over, curious.

It was a photo of a woman, dark hair, blue eyes. It was one of the photos from the wall of Bruce's cell. Their gazes connected, though neither man spoke. They could read everything from the way the skin of their eyelids creased, a purse of the lips. Their bond, renewed, was suddenly tenuous and awkward.

"I-I don't know who she is, I..." Bruce offered, trailing off. He stooped to pick up the photo, examine it. "I don't remember anything about this life. I'm Bruce Banner, physicist, doctor, Hulk, sometimes Avenger. I'm not this guy... I don't know him at all." He held the photo in slightly trembling fingers.

"She's quite lovely, whomever she is." Loki stated flatly. He wasn't about to allow himself to be jealous of some unknown woman in Bruce's life when this life felt so alien to both of them. He had to live in the now, where they were running for their lives together, not shackled by petty insecurities. Bruce clasped one hand to the side of his own head.  
"God, I wish I could _remember_. There's just nothing there at all. No shadows of memories, no flickers. It seems like this version of me must have a pretty great life outside of the... jail time... I feel like a thief taking his life away from him..." Bruce slipped the photo back in his pocket. Loki didn't fail to notice.

"That's where we differ. This 'version' of me is the failed brother of a powerful businessman, with likely no prospects, no ambitions, no _power_ , no _SPINE_..." his voice grew louder. "I'm _glad_ to displace him, whoever he was."

The silence echoed around them in the void of their words. Each man was separated now in his own thoughts, regrets, and speculations.

But their meditations did not linger. Fickle as ever, Bruce and Loki's freedom was only temporary. Law enforcement agents had picked up Alvarez and followed the recorded tracks of all pods departing the area he'd been found. Only one pod happened to drive longer than the rest.  Far longer.  A statistical improbability on the level of 3 deviations above any others.

Even with this information, they were wholly uncoordinated and unprepared for a situation like this. No one 'broke' out of jail anymore. So it wasn't surprising that it took the better part of an entire sidereal cycle to locate the building where they'd ensconced themselves, picking their heat signatures out from amongst the thousands of other workers whose registrations hovered above their heads in the projected augmented reality field.

The officers stormed the building, startling Bruce and Loki out of their reverie. Before they could raise their hands, they were crushed to the floor and shackled. Bruce loosed a string of uncharacteristic curses, more at the shock and then the manner of their treatment than in surprise. This was inevitable. Loki screamed, loud and unendingly. He couldn't magic his way out, his hands were bandaged and bound and there was no fighting to be done, he could only voice his protest in incoherent fury. Bruce called after him as they were carried off to separate pods to be hauled gods knew where.

"Where are you taking us?" Bruce was quick to ask as they lobbed him in the pod with another officer.  
"Courtdeck. But don't ask me what that means for you." Bruce closed his mouth. "There hasn't been a prison escape in... well... I don't know how long. So I don't know what they're going to do with you." Bruce opened his mouth to speak. "And stop asking me questions.  I DON'T know, and if I did, I wouldn't tell you." The rest of the ride was silent, Bruce shivering and cold.

Loki didn't stop screaming. Not until they arrived at 'Courtdeck' Bruce assumed, and they briefly saw each other as they were unloaded roughly from each pod. Bruce and Loki went in the same door, but the guards suddenly split them apart, taking them down opposite corridors. Each man naturally struggled at the separation.

"Loki!"  
" _Bruce!_ Whatever happens, we stand firm!"  
"Loki!!" And like that, they were thrown in separate rooms, unshackled, and the doors slammed shut.

 

***

 

The wait was unbearable. To be powerless, uninformed, meagerly garbed, exhausted, hungry, bruised, separated, and waiting like begging dogs for the next task from their captors was intolerable. The whole thing was madness. Loki banged on the door with his wounded hands but eventually gave up and paced back and forth, constructing fantasies of revenge. Bruce slid into acceptance slightly quicker, getting his breathing under control and centering himself on the floor in the lotus position, slipping into a meditative trance to pass the time.

Their capture was swift, but their wait was long. The guards slid trays of food in twice a day, but refused to answer any questions. One day bled into two, and two into five. Loki began to draw strategies on the wall with bits of smeared food. Bruce exercised, sang at the top of his lungs, and mused over the photo of the mystery woman. The dilemma clawed at his mind. An unknown figure, but one whose smile promised serenity and love. Versus Loki: a tattered demon with sharp fangs that set his heart racing.  
Peace vs chaos.  
Love vs lust.  
Long walks on the beach or inopportune spatial displacement.  
Routine vs spontaneity.  
Expectations vs acceptance.

He was falling, and hard. He knew it through every nerve ending. His body and mind called out to Loki and he knew it was wrong, but his self-preservation was a small fragile thing, easily drowned by the fire enveloping his chest and loins. He hadn't felt this way since Betty. Or was that right? Maybe ever? The long interminable hours faded into teenage daydreams which soothed his normally hungry mind. There were no partial differential equations or astronomic mysteries within these four white walls to satiate his overactive brain. Just thoughts of the pale god filling his waking moments, eroding his self control and spilling alone across his own desperate hands.

 

***

 

Loki knew patience in his long life, but regardless, the uncertain seconds scraped over his skin like rusty nails. At the end of 5 entire cycles, the door opened and a familiar face greeted him.  
"Hello sunshine. It's been a while," Sergeant Petrov taunted.  
"Oh, I _missed you_ , darling," he ventured, leering at her with his fiercest grin. "Last time we met, I feared you dead. Pity," he spat.

She was accompanied by three other guards, each burlier than the last. Her confidence was high as she strode into the center of the cell, glancing at the four walls and Loki's strategic food scribbles appraisingly.  
"I'm a bit more resilient than that, thankfully. Modern medicine and all," she waved expansively, too aloof to explain further.

This was a slightly different Petrov than he'd dealt with before. Confident still, but now eager for violence. He knew the look. He'd seen it hundreds of times before.  
"So I'm sure you're interested to know what lies in store for you now," she paused for dramatic effect and Loki fought the temptation to roll his eyes. She was so green at this: pathetic posturing. "The case is open and shut against you. You'll have your day in court, which is more than I would have expected. But there's no point in fighting. You're _done_."  
At some invisible cue, the other three guards formed a circle around Loki and he dropped into a defensive stance.  
"So this is: what? A playground prelude to my punishment?" he was all deferential mocking, even as he prepared himself to fight like hell.  
"Oh, no. This is off the record entirely. This is just me getting my... how did they used to say it? 'Pound of flesh'?" Loki didn't have time for another terse remark, dodging a hammer-sized fist from one guard while the other two circled him for better strategic advantage. Loki rolled into a ball and sprang up closer to the wall. At least now he'd have eyes on all of his assailants. They wasted no time closing rank around him. In such situations, experience taught him, better to be on the offensive than wait for the inevitable axe to fall.

Loki fought dirty, kicking the shortest of the three in the groin, smashing his lower jaw into his upper with one fist in an uppercut as he doubled over in pain. His own knuckles split open from the impact. The remaining two guards swooped in, trying to grab him as he rolled again, temporarily out of reach. He dove behind Sergeant Petrov to try and use her as a bargaining chip, but she was all too ready for Loki this time. Her baton flew into her hand, blunt end cracking the vulnerable bone between his temple and his eye socket. The room spun and Loki with it, away from his attackers to steady one hand on the wall.

"Tsk. Now look what you've done. You've made us injure you. _Visibly_. That wasn't in the cards, I assure you." His chest was heaving, no breath for a witty comeback. "We'll have to get that healed up before your trial." She paused, pretending to inspect unvarnished nails. Loki nearly gagged on the melodrama as well as his vertigo. "No matter. There are _other ways_ we can hurt you." She grinned wickedly.

No matter the players, no matter the realm, no matter the century, the pain always played out the same. Loki straightened into a roundhouse kick towards the tallest assailant as he approached, but the man was as swift as he was large, catching Loki's leg and sweeping him onto the ground.

They were unnaturally coordinated, for all of their naivety. The middle guard pinned Loki's arms while the shortest guard, now partially recovered, grabbed his left leg. The tall guard chuckled mirthlessly and fell onto his right, twisting it sharply in the process and making him cry out. Damn this mortal body! It was the only thought in his head until Petrov brandished her baton again, loosing the orange tongue of electricity.

She waved it over his torso, and the shortest guard was only too quick to hike up Loki's shirt, exposing his flat white stomach. It spoke to her lack of intelligence that she employed no prelude to exacerbate Loki's fearful anticipation. Instead, she made quick work in letting the end of the orange fire lick across his stomach, burning furrows through his skin. He screamed again. The pain seemed to be heightened in his mortal form, or maybe that was just his memory being kind. She drew mindless patterns of pain, the baton scorching through his skin, leaving a blackened trail of cauterized flesh behind, flecked with blood. He screamed until he had no breath left and she had criss-crossed his stomach with raw open wounds.

"Turn him over."

The lackeys did as they were told, eliciting a cry that Loki tried to muffle as his torn flesh kissed the cold floor. He felt his pant legs being lifted, exposing his flesh from feet to knee. His mind raced with a thousand things they could do. Bend his legs backwards and break his kneecaps? Slice through his Achilles tendons? Scorch the bottoms of his feet? Slice off his feet? Slice off his legs?!

He heard Petrov chuckle and realized his fears were written plainly on his face. She grabbed a fistful of his long hair and pulled his head back, off the ground, and leaned in close enough for him to smell the residue of her last meal on her breath.  
"No visible wounds. I promised you that, Mr. Lawson. After all, I have my job to worry about." She licked the side of his face in a line from chin to cheek but he couldn't turn away, lest he tear the hair from his head.

She chuckled at his repulsion. And then started. The baton was out again: he knew that with painful clarity even before they started. He didn't need to see it. Now, the pain was blinding, and he clenched his teeth so hard he thought they would crumble. The back of his calves were molten lava. The biting pain of skin being sliced off was so overwhelming that he couldn't feel the blood trickle down his legs as she worked.

Petrov started on the other leg, and Loki's vision wavered, on the edge of passing out. The stench of burning flesh filled his nostrils as he was flayed open. As the darkness closed in, he was at once both infinitely grateful and fervently raging against the weakness of his mortal frame.

 

 

***


	20. Chapter 20

The walls were almost but not entirely soundproof. As it was, Bruce spent the last four days of his solitary sojourn worried sick that the animal screams he'd heard earlier were Loki's. They had every reason to torture him, from what he'd seen and what Loki had imparted to him during their brief flight of freedom.

His traitorous mind unearthed the memories of pain both men had sustained at each others' hands. And later, the pleasure that had followed. The way Loki's expressive eyes conveyed more than his words ever could, silvertongue or not. The way his cold hands settled on his waistline, pulling him closer and proving to be both the strong body he needed and the skilled lover he didn't deserve.

But now, listening to and later remembering the screams, he couldn't possibly reconcile the idea of Loki being tortured until his voice gave out. Was this a civil society, or a crude farce? Had homo sapiens reached the stars and failed to rise above their barbaric beginnings? It was pitiful and sad and oh so inevitable all at once. Maybe Carl Sagan was right after all.

Bruce was tempted to appeal to a higher power, but knew it fruitless. He could only wait, beg for information once a day when food was delivered, be denied, then ponder and worry and wait and begin the cycle anew.

"Banner." The cell door opened fully at last, no food delivery present now. "Get up. Time for your sentencing." Sentence? Ah, so this 'efficient' society had done away with the trial altogether. He stumbled forward on hesitant feet.  
"Where is Loki?" The guard look perplexed.  
"Who?"  
"Loki. Uh... Lawson? Mr Lawson." His brows drew together, trying to remember the placid name they'd given his lithe demon. A far and unfair cry from his true nature.  
"Lawson is being sentenced, too. Hurry up, the court isn't going to wait for you." The black baton appeared in the guard's hand, held at his thigh, inert but intimidating nevertheless.

Bruce shuffled down the narrow hallway, not out of petulance, but his own anxiety suffusing his muscles. Loki was down this corridor. Loki and he would be reunited, albeit briefly.  He had no doubts of that. How badly would he be mutilated? He didn't want to see and have his worst fears become real.

One foot in front of the other, and intermittently a baton at his spine, pushing him forward.

Open the box, kill Schrodinger's cat? Open the box, see Loki's pain made real.

His decision was taken away from him, as everything else had been. The door was retracted soundlessly and the Courtdeck laid before him. It was not what he'd expected, populated with two dozen spectators, a handful of guards, and at the fore a strange 3D animated female visage, blinking placidly and staring him into place before migrating to evaluate the other humans in the unembellished space.

A baton at his lower back prompted him to the front of the room where Loki occupied one seat. He dropped into the other without preamble. The other man seemed whiter for the purple bruise at his temple, his long hair falling in greasy, unkempt waves around his shoulders.

But he was alive.

"Loki..." the other man caught his eyes, a tired smile managing to curve his lips up at one end.  
"Hello, _Bruce_." God, even clearly tortured, the words slid out of his mouth in a sinuous growl that sent the blood that wasn't occupied with fear straight to his groin. Sex on fire, this one. Even while facing his doom.

Which is all it could be, from the haughty raised chins of the guards watching them keenly and the hopelessness the computer interface radiated through its inhuman visage.

  
"Session 24E5F2 commencing." The display of the head swiveled and locked him with its dead-fish eyes. "Defendant Banner, a plea of not-guilty has been entered automatically on your behalf. After consideration of all data, the court computes you guilty of assaulting officers of the law and theft of Sol Alpha commonwealth property. Your previously interrupted sentence is therefore re-instated, and an additional 4 days appended for your crimes." A feminine cry wafted from the back of the room, but Bruce paid it no mind in light of the cold machine determining his fate. "You will be detained to level 3 to serve your sentence at the end of this summary."

The face swiveled its eyes to Loki now, and Bruce could see him sit up straighter, even as he tried to exude an air of nonchalance.

"Session 24E5F3 commencing. Defendant Lawson, a plea of not-guilty has been entered automatically on your behalf. After consideration of all data, the court computes you guilty of assaulting officers of the law, theft of Sol Alpha commonwealth property, willfully contradicting orders of incarceration, assault of government staff, attempted murder of officers of the law, damage to government facilities, theft of government property, willfully reverse engineering government medical intelligence, and breaking into DynaTron Inc property unlawfully. Your previously commuted sentence is therefore re-instated, and an additional 3 years, 150 days appended for your crimes. You will be detained to level 9 to serve your sentence at the end of this summary." Bruce had gasped somewhere in the middle of the diatribe, but he couldn't remember when. Loki was non-plussed. Relived even. What _had_ he expected?

"Defendants: do you have any comments to be entered into the public record before your sentences commence?" Bruce and Loki locked eyes. Daring the other to speak. Trying in vain to extend this moment of serenity before they were split apart again, perhaps forever. Perhaps their memories wiped, overwritten with another reality. The future was all unknown.  It was terrifying.

"Bruce! _Bruce_ \- No, please: you've _got_ to reconsider!" The voice from the gallery re-emerged, emboldened by the silence from the computerized judge/jury/executioner. It was a woman: no, THE woman. The woman in the photo. Bruce stifled a gasp of his own. She was standing above the seated witnesses in the gallery, a white handkerchief clenched in her manicured nails, mascara dripping artfully down her feminine cheekbones, framed by soft brown curls. And in a fraction of a moment, her name came back to Bruce.

"Betty." She turned at her name, mouthing Bruce's name back to him soundlessly. Depthless sorrow and love was written across her face. Memories rushed at him like a video on fast forward. Her smile. Delight exploring the biodomes; sunlight filtered through the leaves like panes of glass. Cooking together over an ancient and outlawed 'stove'. Her hands playfully clasping his shoulders. Then her mouth on his. The way she tasted like some rich, forgotten flavor. Her lashes, framing her eyes, inviting him closer, taking him in. Embracing his body. Loving him.

The desperation was apparent on her face. How long had he been gone? Maybe three weeks? And now only another 4 days. But, oh! Her terror was apparent. And bewildering. He had to say something. He had to _do something_. But despite the renewal of his memories, he was as motionless as a stone.

"Defendants: do you have any comments?"

Bruce turned between the judge and Betty, unable to decide who to address. Did he love her? Three weeks ago, certainly. But now?

And a deeper concern: was his love so fickle to erode entirely in mere weeks? But... those weeks had encompassed his entire whole life. A whole lifetime without this woman, no matter if she uncannily resembled Betty Ross, the subject of his perpetual longing. Unconsummated lover. THE woman, the only woman worth anything: unblemished, on a pedestal above all others.

But this woman. Was it her? Or another version of her? Had another version of him loved her? Undoubtedly. Did the current version? He ventured a glance at Loki, unconsciously.  
Safety vs risk?  
Convention or rebellion?  
Stability or challenge?  
Love or... love?

"Bruce?" Her proud voice was timid now from lack of response, and Bruce drew his eyes from Loki's blank, unreadable pupils.  
"Betty," he began, timid of his own accord. "You _know_ I love you..." But.  
It didn't have to be said.

He turned back to the computerized judge, waiting expectantly for an answer.

"I have only one comment." Suddenly, his mind was crystallized with what he had to say. "When you incarcerate people and turn their minds _inside out_ , when you give them a totally new reality, when you make the punishment more severe than the crime: you are _not_ reducing recidivism, or making the prison experience more efficient, or cost-effective, or whatever it is you tell yourself and your _programmers_ and constituents. What you are doing is creating a new breed of destroyed lives, ones who cannot remember who they are, what crime they committed, who they loved, who loved them. This is _wrong_ , capital W. And everyone in this room other than this computer read-out knows it in their bones." His voice was on the edge of shouting and his finger pointed accusingly at their CGI tormentor.

"Defendant Lawson: do you have any comments?" The voice was impassive as ever. His outcry had been recorded, disregarded, and made not one iota of difference.

Loki uncrossed his legs - when had he started reclining? He unlaced his fingers, splaying them flatly on the table surface. He cocked his head, wafting an errand strand of hair coolly from his forehead. He was the picture of nonchalance in the face of a towering sentence.

"Why comment? It matters not. This upside-down world with its abundance of space and dearth of empathy clearly has no use for my words." He turned to Bruce, passive face contorting into hot jealously and cold determination. Not missing a beat. "You are _mine_ , forever." His eyes were on fire. The room dissolved around them. Insignificant. "No matter what you or anyone else says. No matter what they feed me or force me to confess. I _will_ find you, Bruce."

"Sentencing ended. Incarceration commencing." The voice did not miss a beat, and the guards, including the now-familiar and gloating Alvarez and Petrov swooped in, binding their hands and bundling them through separate exits.

"Bruce!!" he heard Betty cry, her voice pregnant with longing and sorrow. It would have broken his heart had it not already been rent with the distance growing between him and Loki.

" _Loki!_ " he shouted, but it was too late and the door closed behind him, consuming all light and sound and pushing him into a nondescript hallway. Narrow, like the rest. He could have been here before, but it was so featureless, he couldn't possibly recollect. As he was pushed one direction, Loki was steered the other. But Loki's ego would not let him go quietly.

When they opened the stairwell to guide him up to floor 9, Loki reacted, crushing one and then the other guard that flanked him into the door frame. He crouched, driving elbows into soft guts. He knew the batons would come soon, he knew it was fruitless, but he didn't care. He couldn't be true to himself if he didn't at least make a show of resistance. He wouldn't go quietly, magic or no.

He had just time enough to run up one flight of stairs, no matter that he was running towards his cell, not away from it.  The electric fire ripped across the backs of his not-quite-healed legs as he reached the top.  The agony brought him to his knees. He hissed, trying to stifle the cry of pain, but then gave up, screaming at his captors like a rabid dog. They would have to put him down like one.

He had little to lose, but he knew his actions were futile. They traded blows and blocks. He threw one guard down the stairs. He received an elbow to the top of his head, altogether too close to the sensitive bruise around his eye socket, his teeth cracked together from the blunt force. He spat blood, tongue cut, into the eyes of Alvarez. Two guards used the moment's confusion to wrench Loki's arms behind his back. Alvarez wiped the blood and saliva from his own face.

"Fucker." Alvarez bruised his knuckles working over Loki's stomach and ribcage, making him curl with lost breath. Both fists attacked his face, and the white flesh yielded, blossoming with blood. Alvarez gave up at long last, the captive slumped in the arms of the other guards, both men out of breath, chests heaving.

Despite it all, Loki started to chuckle. Low and broken, nearly sobs. Then condensing into chuckles of disbelief, pitch rising. The guards were dumbfounded. They'd never encountered a prisoner like 'Lawson'. No one who'd broken out, attacked them, went on the run, and now was futilely fighting them, outnumbered and outmatched, step by step to his cell. The chuckles crescendoed to hysteria, laughs near screams, bordering on manic cries.

"You are _fucked up_ , man." Alvarez shook his head, taking one step back unconsciously.  
"Yes. I am." Loki continued to giggle. "And no matter _what_ you do to me, I will _always_ be 'fucked up'. You can't change me, regardless of how hard you try." Alvarez shook his head, uncomprehending.  
"Keep him moving," he murmured to the other guards, who proceeded to drag Loki, hanging from their arms, feet barely treading ground, up the stairs and down the hallway.

Room 904.

As the door opened on the sterile room and pod within, he gave one last try of resistance, sweeping his legs under the guard propping him up on the right. As the man tumbled, Loki wrenched out of the other's grasp and brought his fist in an arc down on Alvarez's foolishly turned back, knocking the breath out of him and tripping him into the wall ahead.

It was truly a last stand. The remaining guard felled Loki with a haymaker across his abused temple, spinning him off his feet with the impact of the blow and nearly making him lose consciousness. They dragged his flaccid body to the pod, bloody and spent. He wasn't able to resist as they mounted the goggles and cap over his face and lanced his veins open to accept the Hypno-prep™. Ports on the bottom of the pod impaled his renal veins. But the pain was a mosquito annoyance now. They slipped the cover over the pod and Loki's world dissolved.

 

  
***

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Loki does try, doesn't he? That's why we love him.  
> What lies in store for our heroes now that they're back in prison? New chapter, up tomorrow if I can finish editing it!


	21. Chapter 21

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Short chapter, setting the stage for the next act!

"Good morning, starshine." Bruce reached for his glasses blindly, and Tony Stark's precisely groomed face swum into focus. "Got some lemon verbena herbal tea for you, you big champion-of-the-Earth, you." Tony leveled a slow motion punch of friendship at his shoulder, pantomiming some epic struggle. His grin was electric and Bruce couldn't help but return it, bewildered.

"What happened?"  
"You are a record on repeat Bruce, I _love_ it. 'What happened?' Ha. Good one." Tony sprang to the balls of his feet, dancing around artfully-placed furniture in an opulent lounge in Stark Tower. "Well, first Doom showed up - because we haven't talked to _him_ in ages. And he paraded his bots down 5th Avenue." His face grew serious. "You do remember that, don't you?" Bruce could only offer him knit eyebrows and a sheepish grin. "Because that was before you transformed into the great destroyer of all things evil and robotic and donated _all_ of Doom's creations to the NYC _recycling_ program." To finish his epic retelling, Tony broke into a round of slow clapping. "Bravo, Banner, bravo. Can I just say: we are _so_ glad to have you on the team." He flashed his brightest billion-dollar smile and Bruce quailed under the attention.

"You're welcome? I think. Um... I'm going to sound like a broken record again," he warned and ran his fingers through his shaggy hair out of habit. "Did I hurt anyone?"  
"Ha! Just Doctor Doom's ego, that's all." Tony dropped onto the couch next to Bruce. "But you don't remember any of it? Even _before_ Hulking out?" His demeanor was troubled. The man was a hyperactive chameleon.

Bruce had to fish around in his own brain for a minute. What did he remember? No Dr Doom, that was certain. The space where this afternoon should have been was blank. What about this morning? He must have woken up, had breakfast... but even those banalities were vacant in his mind.

He remembered... he remembered... Betty. And a courtroom. And a stolen car. And Loki. Loki?

"Did... did Loki have anything to do with this attack?" Tony's face was an innocent puzzle.  
"Who's Loki?"

Bruce's blood ran cold. Something was very wrong.

"Loki, you know. God of Lies... crazy in a weird-stand-up-humor way? Lots of cats in his brain?" Tony looked at him like HE was the crazy one. "Reindeer games?" he offered, but received no glimmer of recognition. "Thor's adopted brother?"  
"Thor's an only child. I think. I didn't really ask him." Bruce felt his stomach drop to his knees.

There were so many memories in his head.  They came rushing back with furious speed as he combed through his brain. The attack on New York. The dark elf invasion. His captivity. The flight from Sakaar. The destruction of Asgard. Thanos murdering Loki and his subsequent rampage. And then... strange visions of humanity orbiting the sun. A jailbreak. Loki defying the odds and making their captors shrink against the walls, despite their glaring vulnerability. And... everything else that had happened in the intervening twilight hours. It was a rush of memories that made him dizzy.

How could Tony have no memories of Loki at all? It felt like a huge hole had been carved in his chest. The absence of the dark god in this universe was palpable: a physical loss. A rift in spacetime. Tony's words had been few, but he knew it with painful certainty. He had no answers at all, only questions. Was Loki a figment of his imagination? Had it all been a dream? Or had some evil magic unwoven his existence? Made everyone but Bruce forget?

The more Tony stared at him, eyebrows contorting in puzzlement, the more he feared any of the above theories were true.

"I think you might need a break, buddy. You are _way_ overworked. Let me set you up with the high priest at the Buddhist center over on 81st. I'll have him over here today, you and he can totally zen out together. Pepper's got his number, I'm sure. Or better yet, let me call up the Ladies of Shiatsu _massage_ parlor. I've got them on speed-dial. They will turn you into putty, buddy. Ha!" he chuckled, barely breaking his tirade to breathe. "Or would getting back into the lab be the ticket? I'll have Jarvis cancel my meetings and we can nerd out for the _rest_ of the day-"  
"Tony, Tony - please, I'm fine. I just need some time to come down." He fidgeted with his hands, all nervous energy. "You know, post-transformation. I-I just need some tea - thank you by the way - and some me-time."  
"Okay bud, you're the boss. If that's what you need then consider me gone. I was _never_ here." Bruce winced at the oblique reference, but Tony was oblivious. "You just let me know if you want to take me up on those massage ladies after all. I'll _join_ you! It'll be a party! Well, Pepper probably won't like it, but we can invite her too- Hey, Pepper!" Tony had simultaneously talked himself into the elevator and called Pepper Potts on his ever-present StarkPhone. The elevator door now closed and curtailed his diatribe, leaving Bruce in his wake: a vacuum of sound and motion and energy.

He took a deep breath, centering himself after being the subject of Tony's undivided attention. The man was a force of nature!

As the air escaped his lungs, his mind was filled once again with troubling thoughts. Did anyone else remember Loki? Was he going slowly mad? Was this story, this character, something that his subconscious mind had concocted to keep him occupied while the Hulk was in control? Or was he under some spell? Or was he still in Loki's torture chamber, a massively elaborate fantasy playing out? The rug, about to be whisked out from under him again?

What was _real anymore?_ Were these hands his? Was Tony real? Or did people disappear as soon as they left the room? Maybe he was just a computer simulation of himself. His skin crawled, and he shook off a powerful urge to itch it all off.

He was going crazy. He was _going crazy!_ Bruce valued solitude, and he certainly couldn't deal with Tony right now, but he NEEDED others around him RIGHT NOW to keep these spiraling thoughts in control. He couldn't reason this one out. There was no evidence to review, no tangible experiment to run. All the hypotheses, all the answers, were in his own head.

He decided to take a walk to clear it.

 

 

***


	22. Chapter 22

"Hello Banner, how are you, old friend?" He was almost successful in escaping Stark Tower, but Thor was in the lobby, blocking his exit.  
"Uh, hi Thor. How are you doing after the excitement earlier?" Maybe this wasn't a bad thing after all.  He smirked with chagrin, hoping to change his poor luck at being temporarily blocked from the city outside by poking the titanic Asgardian for information.  
"Most excellent. Doom stood no chance against our united force. I am glad we fight side by side." His blue eyes were electric with the joy of victory and camaraderie as he clasped Bruce's shoulder with one mammoth hand.  
"Yeah, cool, cool. I'm glad we came out of it unscathed. Not like that time when we were fighting your brother, Loki. That was all _kinds_ of messed up." The clever words faded on his tongue as confusion gathered on Thor's brow.  
"My brother? I'm not sure I know whom you mention."  
"Uh... you know," Bruce couldn't help but push his glasses up his nose nervously. "The god of lies, black hair, horns?" He brought his index fingers to the top of his head as if any demonstration was needed.  
"Did you suffer a blow, Banner?" Thor glanced him over from head to toe. "There are no such creatures in my family lineage, at least... not that I am aware of." His smile was warm and friendly now, full of concern.  
"Uh, that's my mistake I guess. You know, all that Norse mythology. Us humans... getting all sorts of stuff mixed up." He itched the back of his head anxiously and shuffled backwards towards the lobby exit. Thor took it all with natural aplomb.  
"Ha ha! Yes, very true! All the stories my father told me when I was a young boy. You Midgardians have so much of our history confused. Ha! Be well, my friend!" Bruce waved goodbye and the revolving doors whisked him from marble sterility to noise and exhaust and chaos not of his own making.

Perfect.

He'd let himself get lost here. Wander the streets for a few hours and let his raving mind quiet against the condensed swarm of humanity. Anonymity. Its what he needed right now, and fortunately he could revel in it. The Hulk or Captain America or Thor would be recognized in a heartbeat and swarmed by the crowd, but he was just another sneaker-shod, hoodie-wearing dude approaching middle age. He was no one at all.

He forced his overactive mind to a corner, cramming figurative socks into its incessant stream of chatter and duct taping it shut. Which wasn't at all easy. It would surface for air, spilling worries into his train of thought. Memories unreliable. Narrative interrupted. Reality distorted. And then Bruce would shove it all back down, eyes flickering from a newspaper stand to a group of hungry pigeons to an overwhelmed dog-walker to a discarded head of lettuce rotting at the curb. There was no end to the sensory input of a Manhattan street. The honking of agitated taxi drivers, second-hand smoke from office workers multitasking on their phones, tourists filling their eyes with an unending visual thirst. His eyes darted from face to face, keeping the clawing worries at bay.

Blue eyes. Brunette with a bob. Trim mustache. Glossy black curls. Pimpled teen. He named and discarded each new person in short precise descriptions. Blonde. Graying professor. Wavy brown hair.

He had to do a double take. There was something familiar about that face. Betty? He knew it couldn't possibly be, but it didn't stop him from pursuing her face through the crowd for the better part of a minute until he was sure it was someone else.

Hot dog vendor. Tall redhead. Sweating banker. Crying baby. Light brown hair in tight curls.

There was something about the way this woman walked. Her mannerisms as she lifted the cigarette to her lips. She was walking away from Bruce, but he felt compelled to follow. As if pulled by an invisible noose. She was almost... _god_ , her shape, her forest green jacket, the hair that fell past her shoulders. She could have been his mother. Strike 'could have', she was _exactly_ like her. Bruce lost track of the blocks, determined to follow this phantom. But he kept his distance. Like 'Betty', if he got too close, he was sure the veil would lift and she would disappear. But this woman was  _so much_ like his mother. It was uncanny. He toyed with the fantasy in his head, coddling and nurturing it until she pivoted to turn a corner and he saw her face in profile. The nose, the lips, the eyes. All wrong.

It was like a cold slap of water. Bruce abruptly stopped walking but the bodies behind him simply altered their path and flowed around him like water, never breaking stride.

She was _too much_ like his mother, Rebecca. The loss stung him deep in his chest like a blade. It was unnerving for his bone-deep recognition to be revealed as nothing more than a phantom in the end. He swallowed slowly, blinking. Bruce finally regained his awareness and looked about. He was next to a tiny trendy Chinese restaurant. A parking structure with a perforated metal facade. Low rise industrial office buildings. He could smell the river, but he was between street signs and temporarily out of sorts. How far had he followed that woman? She mesmerized him for probably a mile or more.

He turned around and started walking back. The sun was already low in the sky. He put it over his left shoulder and reasoned he was walking north east. Sure enough, the sign for 52nd Street showed him he'd walked a good distance south. Despite the agitation in his mind, he was feeling a little better. The exercise and the fresh-ish air had helped, flooding his veins with serotonin. Reality condensed around him. The feel of pavement beneath his feet. The cool breeze pushing his hair around.

He ducked into a Starbucks for a moment to refresh himself and get a cup of tea. Things were feeling 'normal' again, even if it was a timid grasp of the sensation.

The barista smiled wanly at him, tired from a long shift.  
"What can I get you, sir?"  
"I'll have a tall earl grey with lavender and soy milk. Thanks." The barista scribbled down his concoction.  
"A name for the order?"  
"Bruce, thanks." He smiled warmly, but the man in front of him was nonplussed. Ah, New York. He felt more normal by the minute.

His drink was ready mere moments later and he grabbed it and headed back out, ready to return to Stark Tower. He let his eyes wander again and his heart beat drummed a slow beat, taking in the mass of humanity as he walked.

 

***

 

He was in a much better mood when he returned to Stark Tower. The mind was a malleable thing, and thank goodness. Tony was subdued from his earlier mania, which was an approximate 'normal' for the genius philanthropist. Their new respective energy levels met each other halfway and Bruce conceded to pizza and a movie lounging on one of the tower's many overstuffed sofas. Steve showed up as well, and Tony spent the movie lobbing good-natured barbs his way. Bruce was at peace, so much so that he stayed for the entire movie, only shuffling off to bed when the credits finally rolled.

The next day, he even accepted Tony's invitation to resume work in the lab. It was some funny energy signature that the VLA had picked up and the DOE conveyed by way of SHIELD.  The rest of the week passed in contentment. The Hulk was barely simmering under his skin, having been happily released only 'days' before against Doctor Doom's bots. Bruce could focus all of his energy on this fascinating enigma. It was singular, without pattern. It radiated from an area in the sky surrounding Beta Geminorum: the star Pollux in Gemini. There was a burst of bosons lighting up the detectors, and then it died to a hum, and then it was gone. It defied explanation.  On top of the puzzle, they were also devoting sections of their lab to help Reed Richards develop new smart material for his suit. This, truly, was what Bruce enjoyed. The ability to be productive, to push the boundaries of human knowledge. To create something new. To be the discoverer.

"Hey Tony, can you pass me that charging cable? My StarkPad is about to die." Tony grinned and chucked the adapter in his direction.  
"There's our next project. _Unlimited_ batteries. After, of course, the other three dozen projects we have."  
"Thanks. Yeah, this mystery signal has me totally perplexed. It doesn't seem artificial, but there's nothing we know of that could have made it. It's similar but certainly not like the Tesseract."  
"What's that?" Tony shot him a look of mild curiosity.  
"The Tesseract? You know, Thor..." Bruce stopped himself mid-sentence. "I-I _think_ Thor mentioned it at one point..." He tried covering his slip, albeit sloppily. The more time passed, the more difficult it became to tell the fiction from reality. The Tesseract was a fiction. Dr. Jane Foster had never achieved widespread fame, being properly recognized only by the scientific community and only in retrospect for her Bifrost theories. She and Thor had never met. Dr Erik Selvig had never visited Stark Tower. At the center of all of the chaos was Loki, naturally. His absence twisted reality on its head.

Tony threw a skeptical look at his verbal 180.  
"You know Banner, I still think you ought to sit down with one of those SHIELD psychologists." He won a hard look of derision from Bruce. "Okay, _no_ , or maybe Pepper could find us the name of a good past-life regressionist? You know, maybe give it a _try_? It couldn't hurt. I mean, the _stuff_ you say lately. I wonder if the stress has gotten to you and you're suffering a pre-mental breakdown or you're channeling some other version of Bruce or you're picking up signals on your fillings. I don't know, it's just _weird_ , is all." He put his hands up in mock surrender.

Bruce sighed, giving up under Tony's trademark wave of chatter. He had only mentioned Loki to Tony and Thor. Given the blank and concerned reactions he'd received from both men, he decided not to bring Loki up by name again. He didn't need to give Tony or anyone else a reason to sit him down with another SHIELD shrink. Not after his first bad reaction all those months... years... ago? It was impossible to plot his life in clean timelines anymore.

But it was also impossible to keep all the loose ends tied up. The Tesseract, for instance. He had to keep trying, but it was exhausting.

"You know, maybe that's not a bad idea. I'm up for ANYthing at this point." Tony's face lit up. "I take that back. Not anything. Not SHIELD. And not anyone on _your_ payroll. I love you Tony, but _no_."  
"Alright, fair deal green bean. I worry about you. That's all." He threw Bruce a genuine warm gaze, all pouty lips and puppy dog eyes. He couldn't help but chuckle. It was good to have a friend like this. A friend at all - full stop.  
"Thanks, Tony."

But under it all, despite Tony's best intentions and Bruce's best attempts, like a scabbed wound, he wondered each night in the space between wakefulness and sleep: was it a dream? Was it a 'past life'? Or was it real?

Or was he going crazy?

 

***

 

He deferred to crazy when he was out on another walk. Bruce had gotten up before dawn, far earlier than Tony would wake. Earlier than most people in Manhattan would be up, but late enough that the garbage men were heading home. Late enough that the scent of baking bagels wafted across the crisp air. A handful of women and one man were doing their early dawn walk-of-shame.

He chuckled to himself, softly enough that no one would mistake him for a loon. That was one of the things he loved about this city. Beneath its vibrancy, the glitz and glamour, the high stakes and devastating lows, there was a wonderful brand of anonymity which enabled the populace to TRY. To dare to be different, to be truer to their inner selves than the occupants of other cities.

It was on this musing that Bruce's attention was caught on a shock of black hair. A trenchcoat. A tilt of the jaw. He could see this clearly even though the man was walking in front of him. There was _something_ about his stride. Something about the way that the men restocking the newspaper dispensers unconsciously moved out of his way. The way the women rolling up the storefront grates stared just a little too long. A pretty and dangerous bauble strolling down the lane.

Two forbidden, unspoken syllables caught in his throat. He wouldn't name him yet. But Bruce quickened his pace all the same. He stayed a fair distance behind the man for two full blocks. Close enough proximity to admire. Not far enough to lose sight. Not close enough to destroy his fantasy. His heart sped in his chest. It was too much to hope for, certainly. Thor had proven that Loki was not part of their reality. He was just a creation of Bruce's lonely mind.

And yet...

Bruce closed the distance between them. Loki. It must be. The man stooped under an untrimmed tree branch, and Bruce saw him in profile.

No.

No, no, _no_... No, the nose was all wrong. No, the lips were too full. The eyes were dull and indifferent, placid where there should be fire. It brought his feet unconsciously to a halt and he had to fight down a building sob that spilled from his tight chest up through his throat.

No. Not him. No. _Not_ the darkest, most secret of his desires. _Not_ his guilty pleasure. _Not_ his lovely tormentor.

"Fuck!!" Bruce yelled, uncaring of who saw or how many pigeons were startled awake. Fuck. Fuck his malleable brain. Damn his careless heart. He turned around and put the doppelganger out of his sight.

A run through Central Park would clear his head.

The city saw his despair, his outcry, and filed him right along with all the other anonymous people. And then it shook its collective head and went right back to work.

 

  
***


	23. Chapter 23

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You asked for it, you got it! More Natasha and Bruce.  
> Ha! Actually, no one asked for it, but c'est la vie. :)

  
Natasha dragged him to the Guggenheim one day.  
"I'm worried about you, Bruce." Her impish lips quirked, perfectly painted scarlet. "You've sequestered yourself in the lab... or you go on long walks through the city doing _god knows_ what." That was all the reason she needed. Off they went, chauffeured in one of Tony's gaudy pearl white Bentleys to the front steps of the art museum. Bruce wasn't about to complain. It was wonderful at any time to be escorted by a beautiful woman to contemplate the myriad works of humanity. But it was certainly a balm now as his brain refused to accept the world in front of his face as truth.

They walked through the Impressionists, the post-Impressionists, the Futurists. Neither Natasha nor he were art students, but they could appreciate the aesthetics and history all the same. The Russian was characteristically reserved and only made the infrequent comment, choosing to remain by Bruce's side, a quiet companion. He couldn't help but be grateful. The juxtaposition with Tony's mania was dizzying. It was such a pleasure to be out, in public, with a calming presence at his elbow. He was able to take the lead and choose which gallery to see next, but if he ever hesitated, she was there to take the reins.

He was fond of her, that was doubtless. She pointed out a Kandinsky, and he couldn't help but praise her aptitude. Between the two of them, she was clearly better versed in art. But was it real knowledge, or spy-craft? Perhaps know enough to get by, to ingratiate yourself to the target. But in the end, the source of her apparent knowledge was moot. He admired her for it all the same.

When they passed the travelling collection of Mappelthorpe portraits, the dynamic between them changed. The photographs were lurid black and white images, exquisite and depraved all at once.   
"Do you want to go in?" she asked at the mouth of the gallery, quirking a sculpted eyebrow.  
"Sure. It looks interesting," Bruce deadpanned. Already he could feel his heart picking up speed at the sensual tone of the photos. Around the first bend, out of direct view of the passing public, was a man on all fours, clad in black vinyl from head to toe, no skin showing. It was demure and erotic simultaneously. Bruce cleared his throat unconsciously, scolding himself internally for his reaction.

They passed another set of black and white portraits: a figure wielding a riding crop, the end of the implement in air, mid-arc. In another: a man handcuffed, hands behind his back, ass bare and exposed. Bruce tried and failed to stifle a blush. Who could stifle a blush, anyway?

The photos made his weak mind immediately traverse the ages, distance, eons - what was the appropriate noun? - to Loki. To their time together. What they had done to themselves and each other.

Bruce pushed his glasses up his nose nervously.   
"Are you okay? I mean, is this interesting, or should we try another gallery?" Natasha was all sugar-sweet and Bruce knew a liar when he saw one.   
"No, this is fine. These photographs are so bold, such a courageous oeuvre by the artist." The words spilled from him and he actually quite surprised himself. Natasha too, if her raised eyebrows were anything to go by.  
"I totally agree. He had a lot of guts composing these pictures during the 1960s." She smiled coyly at him, anticipating a cue he was too inept or overwhelmed to provide. "Oh, don't look at me like that... I just read the plaque by the entrance." Her spy-craft at last overplayed.

Bruce was drawn on and on, like a passerby watching a train wreck in slow motion. A woman, her head out of focus, breasts bare and proud. A figure, male or female, it wasn't clear, it didn't matter - covered head to toe in strategically placed leather straps. A man, glaring into the camera, completely nude.

But the one that really cut to Bruce's core was the image of a man, head tossed back, neck exposed, the aperture focused down just to his Adam's apple. It was _so_ raw, _so_ visceral. The image itself was innocent, but what it implied outside of the camera lens was anything but. Vulnerability. Bliss. That one pure moment of ecstasy. He tried to stifle his reaction, but Natasha picked up on it only too easily. Candy from a baby.

"I like this one," she murmured, sliding up to his side like a shadow. "I wonder who the subject was to Mapplethorpe?" She looked at Bruce, fixing her eyes on his face. He felt her stare like a scalpel, dissecting him. His mind couldn't help but think about the dark god who haunted his dreams. The moment when he'd become acutely aware of the other's feelings. Staring at his transparent reflection. That thirst, the burning _hopeless_ need. How he'd echoed it in his own head. How Loki's lips had called to him. Kissing him was an inevitability. And the god didn't even know it. He was so exposed at that moment. Perhaps completely aware of it. And hating it. Or maybe not. Maybe he'd become so accustomed to lying over the centuries that he didn't know when he was telling the truth. When it was plainly etched across his face. Pulsing out of the desperate veins in his neck.

Bruce shook himself back to the present. To the art museum. To Natasha.   
"Good question." He cleared his throat. His voice felt loud enough to shake the ground. "An art student? A friend? Maybe more?" he chuckled self-effacingly. "I couldn't tell you, that's for sure. Are you ready to check out another gallery?" She smiled warmly. Certain she'd gotten an edge over the reticent juggernaut.  
"That sounds good. Thanks for coming out with me today, Bruce." She placed one hand softly over his. "It's always good to have friends, don't you think?" Her ingratiating intention was suddenly so obvious.  
"I agree. Thanks for this afternoon. It's been awesome."

 

  
***

 

But it really wasn't. His days continued to center around morning or evening aimless excursions to the street, just to maintain his sanity. Wandering the pavement at random. Watching the mass of humanity doing what they do best - simply living. Living and not worrying if reality was real. If dreams were truth and daylight was a lie.

His days were spent in the lab. Sometimes with Tony, sometimes with Reed Richards, but more often alone. Tony had a multi-national conglomerate to run. Reed had his own bespoke facility. Bruce had not a penny to his name.

He used to be okay with that, he used to take pride in that. But as he pushed his glasses back up his nose for the millionth time, he grew infinitely tired of being 'Bruce Banner'. One word to Jarvis and he'd booked himself into New York's best Lasik surgeon the following day. No more glasses. A _new_ Bruce. A Bruce that didn't care whether reality was real. A Bruce that jogged through Central Park at _midnight_. A Bruce that tried _cinnamon_ in his oolong tea. A Bruce that contemplated frosted tips on his hair.

No, wait... That was a step too far.

But needless to say, Bruce was tired of being at his wits-end. Tired of second guessing himself. Tired of seeing Betty, his mother, Loki, in a tortilla. Tired of watching out for the Hulk.

Ready to live his life.

 

  
***

 

Bruce was munching on fair-trade vanilla flavored shredded wheat and almond milk, gazing out at the red sun erupting over the Manhattan skyline. Despite his conscious effort at fortitude, at compulsory joie de vivre, his mind continued to play tricks on him. It had been another long night filled with dreams of black hair and cruel eyes. Of running from phantom creatures and an icy, faceless embrace that felt like truth and danger at the same time. Coffee was slowly percolating on the marble countertop and he was fortifying himself for a new day when Tony burst into the kitchen.

"Good morning, green bean! How's my favorite physicist this fine Friday?" Bruce shook himself a little further awake. Simultaneously fatigued at having to deal with Tony's endless cheer and also internally thankful for his energy, he dragged himself out of his momentary reverie.

"Morning, Tony. Too early to tell. Want some coffee? I made a pot for you." Tony could see plainly that Bruce already had a cup of tea for himself, and the gesture was not lost on the billionaire.  
" _Smashing_. Yes, please." As Bruce poured, Tony began his diatribe. "Bruce, my boy. We are going to have an _epic_ weekend. You have plans? Cancel them. What I've got in store is _so_ much better than curling up with QED textbooks and sad jazz, or whatever it is you listen to. I imagine it's sad jazz. Okay, whatever. Here's the plan: I've got you, me, Pepper, and Natasha booked into a Buddhist retreat in Vermont. 'Samsara at Sandgate'. It's a working community, totally vegetarian. They have a zen garden, a _spa_. The ladies will love that. A bespoke _shochu distillery_. I will love that. An ahimsa dairy with weekend volunteer projects. I _know_ you'll get googly eyes over the baby cows. Aaaand..." he dragged out the single syllable for maximum effect. "A therapist specializing in memory impairment. Huh? Sounds _awesome_? Yes: Tony  _at your_ service." He took a grandiose bow and, Bruce imagined, a huge breath of air.

"Wow, Tony. I don't know what to say. Um, thank you?" He fidgeted with his tea cup now, glasses permanently gone. "But, can we spare the entire weekend? I mean, you've got the shareholder meeting in two weeks, right?" Tony opened his mouth and Bruce immediately cut him off. " _Yes_ , I've been listening, ha ha ha." He chuckled softly. "And all the stuff we have going on in the lab, I've wasted so much time and now we can't spare it. I _appreciate_ the gesture, I really do, but-" Tony pressed one calloused finger softly to Bruce's lips, stopping him in mid-stream.  
"But nothing. We're going. My treat. That's final." He threw a million-watt smile in the doctor's direction. "Picking up my new car at noon and then we're hitting the road!"

Bruce knew when he'd been beat.  
"Oh, alright. Thank you."

"Pack your bags. Some work clothes for the dairy and a Speedo for the ladies," he winked lewdly and Bruce couldn't help but blush, even as ridiculous as it was. "Wanna come to the dealership with me to pick up the car?"  
"Oh my god, Tony. _What_ did you buy now?" Bruce shook his head and chuckled to clear the moment of minor embarrassment. Tony threw him a wolfish grin the likes of which Bruce had never seen. His eyes practically shone out of their sockets.  
"The new Audi RS7. _Custom_ tuned by Audi Sport GmbH. It puts out _literally tons_ of horsepower and eats dinosaurs by the barrel. And it's purple."   
He laughed so hard, the almond milk nearly came out of his nose.

Bruce spent the morning in the lab. Tony spent it buried in financial documents. By 11 am however, Tony was itching out of his skin and dragged Bruce out the door and into a cab. It wasn't an amazing idea. The cabbie recognized Tony on sight and spent the 25 minute ride chewing his ear off about Iron Man and Stark Corp. Bruce got the better part of the deal and just sat back, chuckling softly to himself while Tony, for the first time in a long time, was unable to get a word in edgewise.

It wasn't long before the dealership rolled up outside and Tony barreled out, leaving Bruce to settle the tab. By the time he'd paid, got change, and tipped, Tony was already the center of attention at the vertex of a timid but lascivious group of sales people, receptionists, and shop techs. He was back in his element, an electric smile glowing from beneath tinted shades.

"Your car is all ready for you, Mr Stark. Adam here made sure it was waxed and detailed. Marcia has the plates installed and the registration in the glove compartment. And I took the liberty of loading a selection of my favorite songs on a temp file in the hard drive. I-I hope you like Black Sabbath," he supplied in mock-modest fashion. He very well knew the answer, hell _Wikipedia_ knew the answer... Tony clapped his hands together in delight.   
"Petrov, you know me too well. It is a pleasure doing business with you." Hands were shaken enthusiastically. "And thank _you_ for getting this beauty custom built by the mothership in Ingolstadt." Bruce wanted to gag a little from the over-the-top effusiveness.

His eyes wandered as the courtiers paid tribute to their king. It was a beautiful facility: glossy cars staggered in a seemingly random fashion across the white marble floor. Not a scuff or shoe-print marred its surface. Bruce appreciated cars, but they were a luxury item for him, far out of his reach and therefore lusting after them was a silly waste of time. He'd already splurged on the vision-correcting surgery. No, cars were certainly out of reach, especially vehicles like these. Black diamonds, silver ingots, blood red jewels begging men like Tony to test drive them. Caress their redlines and make them sing.

He wandered through the cars as Tony finished the formalities. Most everyone had left their desks to bathe in Stark's reflected glow. It was only a few forlorn cubicles, the absent service desk, and a lonely coffee maker at the periphery. The obligatory framed marketing photos: cars burning through a cloud of rubber smoke at the apex of picturesque curves. Glossy bodywork catching the sunlight through a crash of waves, droplets coating the paint like high-end pornography.

Then the more subdued inspirational posters. Brand merchandising. Employee of the month mugshots. Exterior finishes and interior trim options magnified in glossy panoply.

Wait.

Employee of the month.

That hair.

That jaw.

Those _eyes_.

The breath was stolen from Bruce's lungs. The world around him became dull. He could only hear Tony's laughter as if it came from an echo chamber - far on the limit of his awareness.

The resemblance was UNCANNY. Black hair, albeit closely cropped in typical American businessman fashion. The eyes, blue-green as usual and with their characteristic competitive fire. Lips pursed slyly in a knowing smile. It was Loki. God, it had to be. Or a twin. Or a clone. Or a doppelganger. Or a body-snatcher. Or... His mind ran out of possibilities.

"You ready to go, bud? Or has something caught _your_ eye?" Tony clapped a hand on his shoulder, pulling him out of his reverie. Bruce brushed off the double entendre, lacking the brain power to adequately respond.

'Lucius Laarsen' proclaimed the name plaque under the photo.

The laughter inside Bruce's head was a high, keening giggle bordering on hysteria. He bit the inside of his cheek to prevent it escaping out his mouth. Oh, the _irony_. Was this a sick joke, a conspiracy? Or was it his over-active mind spinning webs on itself?!

"Earth to Bruce?" Tony tried again, actually going so far as to wave his hand in front of the doctor's face.  
"Hey, Tony. D-did you get the car? Are we ready to go?" He was clearly unsettled, the color washed from his face, but trying bravely to right his ship in the storm of emotions passing through his body.  
"All set. Are you ready to go? You look like you've seen a ghost?" That forced a sardonic chuckle out of his mouth.  
"Yeah, maybe. I-I mean, yes. I'm ready to go." Bruce tamped down the clawing desire to look back once more to the photo as they walked out of the showroom to the service center where Tony's purple car was waiting. He tried to keep his stride straight, his breathing even. His heart from collapsing like a doomed star.

"Um, excuse me," his voice cracked on anxiety and he pulled one of the junior salesmen aside just before they exited. "Do you know when Mr Laarsen will be back in the office?" Oh, Loki would be proud of his subterfuge leveling up from 'teething toddler' to simply 'obviously transparent'. He could nearly see the demi-god's condescending smile hovering at that thought.  
"I'm not sure, to be honest. But probably Monday. I think he has this weekend off?" The man was barely out of his teens and still honing his customer service skills.  
"Excellent. I'll pop back in next week. I've got a few questions on a car..."

Lies. _Lies_.

Loki would be proud.

 

 

***

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Didn't see that coming, did you?  
> More fun coming soon. :)


	24. Chapter 24

Tony had never seen the good doctor so full of energy. It scared him a little.  
Bruce was bouncing off the walls when they made it back to Stark Tower in Tony's new ride. He was as concerned for his friend's well-being as he was for an unexpected transformation and the destruction, again, of his favorite living room.

But he couldn't put a finger on why Bruce was so... spunky? Did Banner do spunky?! Apt or not, it was definitely the vibe he was putting out. Had something happened at the dealership? Was he excited for the weekend? For Tony's new car? None of it made sense.

A grin split Bruce's lips, but when questioned he wouldn't give a reason. He just smiled coyly in a manner Tony had never seen on the man. It was... coquettish? Oh my god, did he just compare Doctor Banner to a simpering schoolgirl? Lord in heaven!

The girls had already packed their bags and were waiting in the garage along with Bruce's duffel and Tony's cases.

Bruce's effervescent mode vanished after they got out of the city proper and his adrenaline high had worn off. The doubts rushed in and he found himself staring out of the rear driver-side window at nothing in particular, letting the scenery whisk past. Natasha was next to him, Pepper in the front next to Tony. She tried to engage him, but no luck. Eventually, the three A type personalities gave up and chattered amongst themselves about their week and their expectations for the upcoming weekend.

Hope. That's what Bruce had felt on the tip of his tongue earlier today. It was a dangerous thing for a desperate man, and Bruce was clinging to the knife edge of sanity. Now he could only doubt himself. Was the photo real? Had his eyes tricked him into seeing what he wanted to, instead of reality?

They arrived at the resort, and the ladies went to unpack and freshen up while Tony and Bruce hit the bar.  
"Lagavulin, neat," Tony ordered with a roguish grin.  
"Make that two," Bruce interjected. Tony's eyes shot up to the ceiling.  
"Since _when_ do you drink?" His smile was now a strange mixture of surprise and terror. "Is... that okay?"  
"I'll pace myself," was Bruce's terse reply as the bartender delivered their drinks.

It tasted like cigars dissolved in gasoline, a marked devolution from the taste of whiskey he remembered pre-experiment. But then again, the mind was a fickle thing. So when he told Tony he'd pace himself, he really meant it. It took the entire dinner and dessert that followed for him to finally finish his drink. It gave him a bit of a mellow feeling, nothing more. He felt the Hulk murmur contentedly, a little stimulated, but nothing risky.

He barely slept that night, tormented doubly by thoughts and dreams. When he and Tony ventured out to the dairy in the late morning, he was far from on his game. The bright sunshine and the earthy scent of cows were a welcome balm to his troubled soul. It took all his effort, but he pushed away the clawing 'what-ifs' that could not possibly be resolved until Monday out of the forefront of his mind.

The monks were so caring, so fastidious. They doted on the not-yet-dry cows whose calves had been weaned and moved to pasture, milking them with reverence. They groomed the matriarchs of the herd, past their productive years, but still part of the collective. And both he and Tony went a little soppy over the lone calf, a few weeks old and still shadowing its mother everywhere.

His heart felt full and the hopelessness of the previous day evaporated in the sun. They labored joyfully with the day's chores, the monks kindly directing them when Tony was inept or when Bruce started staring off into space.

But it wasn't to last. The following day, after Pepper and Natasha exhausted all the opportunities at the spa, the two ladies and Tony refreshed themselves with the homemade fermented shochu. Tony cautiously nudged Bruce towards the meditation grounds, pointing out that he had made _other_ arrangements for Bruce's day with all the subtlety of a pickup truck.

Bruce maintained his ambivalent demeanor until he was approached on his wanderings by the memory therapist. She was kind and sweet, her dirty blonde hair melding with her unassuming garb to project nothing but feelings of calm, serenity. But Bruce had his defenses up. He had not and would not completely trust any psychologists on Tony's payroll, even indirectly.

The secrets in his mind were too precious to divulge, and so the hour and a half session was spent in frustration for both of them. He was grateful to Tony for his friendship and his efforts, but this wasn't what he needed. He NEEDED Monday to come and to see with his own eyes if he was mad or no. Then and only then, would he acquiesce to discussing his troubles with someone else. Someone entirely neutral. A third party that did not know his past. Who was not beholden to Tony, or SHIELD, or anyone save himself.

The drive back to the city was the same as the drive up: Tony, Pepper, and Natasha bubbling away and Bruce staring out of the window like a emo teen, his attention rapt only when Tony flicked through the car's flatscreen display, surreptitiously studying the menus.

Sunday night was no better and he was tempted to sneak a drink or two from Tony's ample bar, but when he felt the Hulk agreeing, he tamped that urge back down.

'What if?' was the theme of the night. Bruce stood at his bedroom window, gazing out at the city below. The pull of the crowd was still there, but he was too mentally exhausted to partake of the pavement. Instead, he watched the nighttime stream of headlights below like a perching falcon.

What if Lucius wasn't actually Loki? What if he was, but he didn't remember him? What if there was no way to tell _for certain_  if it was him or not? What if he had different memories, a different past? What if they had none of the trauma in common that they had before? What if there was nothing to build on, no way to connect, just strangers? What if his heart was as cold as ice? What if he wanted nothing to do with Bruce? The questions clawed away at his heart until he felt lightheaded and had to press his forehead to the glass to keep from retching. Bruce had felt love only a few times in his life. His mother and Betty. Alone. But THIS... what he had experienced with Loki... it was so close he could taste it. He wanted to wrap it around himself like a blanket and fall into blissful sleep. He wanted to believe it in his weakest moments, _right now_ , but he knew the dangerous temptation. Hope. He'd felt it on Friday and allowed himself to be carried away with it for an enchanted hour or two. But the remnants of it lodged in his gut like a jagged knife.

He wouldn't allow himself to name it. But he'd felt IT, whatever it was, and the absence of IT and the man who bore it was too much to bear. So much lay in the balance tomorrow. The anxiety tore at him and made his stomach do cartwheels. After being sick in the toilet, Bruce had tired himself out enough that a few hours of sleep enveloped him and carried him into the next fateful day.

 

  
***


	25. Chapter 25

Monday.

Fateful Monday. The dealership would open at 10. Bruce easily identified that online.

The minutes between 6 and 10 am were agonizing. He went through his meager clothes. Nothing was good enough, polished enough. And he couldn't go to Tony. This was all surreptitious. Tony would laugh at him and worse throw him to the shrinks if he knew his plan.

Eventually he collected an old button-down shirt, a pair of worn but still stylish jeans, and threw a blazer over it.   
"Typical Audi buyer?" he murmured at himself sarcastically as he appraised his visage in the mirror. Pathetic. His hair was a mess, bloodshot eyes from little sleep. He discovered a tin of hair wax and some eyedrops. A clean shave and a spray of eau de toilette in the cache of goodies that Tony stocked each en suite with.  He was now feeling much more confident. He stared at the man in the mirror and barely recognized himself. He tilted his jaw upwards a few degrees. The rakish but coiffed hair: thank you mother for the good genes.  The absence of glasses, the casual confidence that the square set of his shoulders communicated. He could be walking into a yachting club for business discussions or meandering through a golf pro shop. Or picking out a new imported car.

It cooled the undulations of his nervous stomach a little. So before he could think otherwise, he sped to the bottom of the building, out to the street, and caught the M4 bus to the dealership off 55th street.  The bus dropped him a few blocks away from his intended destination. It was infuriating because it was just enough time for his overactive brain to work his stomach back into knots after having been successfully distracted on the ride.

His heart rate sped as the dealership signage came into view. He felt the Hulk, already wide awake and curious at Banner's uncharacteristic anxious anticipation, poke him in the metaphorical ribs as if to say 'what's up?'.

"Nothing," he murmured out loud, swallowing repeatedly to keep the bile from coming back up. _Why_ was he so nervous? He tried asking himself from a third perspective. He had to use logic, that was the only way to get through this. What if this wasn't Loki at all, but just a bad camera angle or lighting in the photo? What if it was, and he didn't remember Bruce at all? Or what if he did? NO. No, he couldn't allow himself to think about that third option, because it drew him into attractively circuitous and degenerative patterns of thought as it did all last night.

No. There were only two options. Either it was a man he'd never laid eyes on, or it was a man who'd never lain eyes on him. And in both cases, the best strategy was to pretend to be someone else. Anonymous, just like this city. He wasn't 'Bruce Banner, reclusive scientist and freak' he was 'Bruce Banner, successful businessman and car shopper'. Just another persona. Easy. Anonymous. Risk free. He could do this.

 

***

 

He strode into the showroom, soft light bouncing off the white polished marble floor. A salesman was immediately at his elbow. The _wrong_ salesman. Bruce hadn't the time or bandwidth to categorize his face.  
"Good morning, sir. How can I help you?"  
"Just looking, thanks." Bruce wove aimlessly between the cars. One eye on the wares, one eye on the staff milling about the floor. He was the _only_ customer. Shit! So early in the morning, he should have guessed. He was too hasty in his strategy. And already he could see another salesman deftly making his way over to Bruce. Wrong man again.

"Gorgeous, aren't they? Are you shopping for yourself or-"  
"No, sorry, just looking." Bruce's dismissive smile was tight but polite. _Oh god_ , how many more salesmen would he have to deal with? The fortunate answer was zero.

Loki exited from an office on the back wall, chatting casually with another staff member. Clad in human clothes: grey suit, deep green tie. He drew Bruce's gaze like a magnet. The doctor forgot how to breathe. Fucking hell. It was him. It WAS. He could hear his lilting accent even from this distance. Short hair or no: the set of his shoulders, his stride, it was _all the same_.

"Good morning, something I can help you with?" GOD YES, Bruce wanted to breathe. His knees went a little weak at the dazzling grin sent his way. There was no malice in it, just... pure confidence and optimism. The smile he'd yearned to see for so long. Fuck. It was stunning. HE was stunning.

"Um... y-yeah, I-I," Bruce stopped himself, clearing his throat and trying again through numb lips. "Yes, I-I'm interested in a car. Something practical, dependable, but not over the top." He'd rehearsed this bit. He knew exactly what to say, how to act. After his initial shock, Bruce let himself go on autopilot for a bit and simply basked in the amazing feeling of being in Loki's presence.

"How 'not over the top' are we talking? Would you like to take a look at the A9?" It was clear he was already joking with Bruce, a friendly quirk in both his smile and his eyebrows. The nervous tension exited Bruce's mouth in a short laugh.   
"No, not by a long shot. I was thinking more in the A3 or A5 territory." A veteran salesman surely, his face carefully schooled as Lucius guided them towards the more affordable cars.  
"Excellent choice, I can start to see what you're thinking already." Bruce prayed he really didn't. "Something solid, reliable... just a _bit_ naughty." The mischievous smile was back again. Did he even know he was doing it? It seemed so automatic. "I'm Lucius, by the way." He held a cool hand outstretched and Bruce gave him his best firm-gripped shake.  
"Bruce."  
"Pleasure." Bruce couldn't help but try to fight back a minor blush at that singular word. Loki saved him the effort of replying, guiding them to one particular car. "Now, the A5 Sportback is a beautiful machine. He stroked the hood fondly with his long fingertips. A hair's breadth under 250 horses, all wheel drive, seamless seven speeds, it's brilliant. But it IS still a big car. Four doors, five seats, extra space in the boot, _ridiculous_ to park even with parking assistance enabled. Which is only available on the Prestige models." Bruce couldn't bring himself to care about the specifications or price, his eyes were firmly glued on Loki and the sleek fit of his button down shirt.

"But you seem like a solo gentleman, right? Maybe some companionship now and then," his eyes sparkled on cue, "but no need for room in the back. I am _definitely_ not steering you towards the SUVs. Totally different market. No, my friend," Bruce couldn't help but acquiesce to a sharp intake of breath at the banal familiarity that passed by his lips, "not for you. Now, just bear with me for a moment? You _might_ be interested in the TT coupe or better yet, the Roadster." They walked as he talked, Bruce drawn into his thrall without any conscious effort. They arrived at a small silver car, roofless and lounging, the center of attention. "Before you say 'no', let yourself imagine that, for a moment, you're not worried about insurance premiums and gauche cliches. Just _imagine_..." his voice purred into a silence pregnant with expectation. "Imagine taking this out onto the freeway, roof up when you need it, top down when you _want_ it." The way he curled the word sent shivers down Bruce's spine. He couldn't tell if he was doing it on purpose or if seduction was just his second nature. "230 turbocharged horses, all wheel drive for a right quick zero to 60, room in the boot for groceries or for a weekend bag or two. And one extra seat," he leaned over the passenger door, leering across the empty space, sole finger held aloft in dramatic pause, "for when you need it."  His grin was electric.  "Sexy, right?"

There wasn't breath in Bruce's lungs enough for an answer, so he bobbed his head in what he hoped was mild but appreciative indecision. Forget the car, he was trapped in those deep sparkling eyes. The smirk that quirked at the edges, loving the chase, sensing impending victory. The sharp canines of his beloved predator sneaking out as his smile drew wider.

"Want to take it for a spin?" As if he was going to say no. He had said only a single word in the past three minutes as it was. Loki's eyebrow quirked in triumph and he held up his index finger. "Let me get the keys." He spun on his heel, leaving Bruce gasping for breath in his wake. His heart was hammering in his chest and he could feel the Hulk stirring.

'Not now, buddy. Not now.' It was intoxicating to be in his presence. His smooth voice, his languid mannerisms, his effortless confidence. It did bad, _bad_ things to Bruce's body and mind. He could feel the Hulk chuckle deep within.

Before he had time to mediate on his, Loki was back, dangling keys from an outstretched hand.  
"Shall we? I'll get us out of this horrific traffic, then _you_ can have some fun." He slid into the driver seat and Bruce automatically found the passenger side. The two jilted salesmen from before opened the showroom doors in jealous silence and Bruce avoided looking them in the eyes.

As they wove through traffic, Loki struck up the conversation again.  
"So what brought you in today, Bruce? Looking to upgrade from your current car?" Freed from the vice grip of the green irises that were now locked on the road ahead, Bruce relaxed minutely.  
"No, actually nothing to trade in. I was here with my friend last week picking up his new car and something piqued my interest." See, that wasn't a total lie.   
" _Fantastic_. I'm so glad you came back. What car did your friend decide upon?"  
"I actually have no idea. I just know it was purple," he chuckled incredulously.  
" _Seriously_? Purple?" Bruce ventured a glance over at Loki, his face scrunched in attractive confusion. "You don't mean the custom RS7?"  
"Uh, yeah, I think that's what it was. Too rich for my blood, but what Tony wants, Tony gets." A practiced laugh of nonchalance crept out of his throat. Step two?

He watched closely again as Loki's face slid into total disbelief for a nanosecond before shifting back to confident ease.  
"Cheers. That is a _gorgeous_ car. I have to admit, I spent two days drooling over that machine while the techs got it ready for Mr Stark." From a red light, he shifted quickly up to speed. If his face didn't give away his envy, his body certainly did. It wasn't hardly fair, but Bruce could read him well after so long.  
"Yeah, it is. Maybe that's why I am actually entertaining the idea of buying this car." He laughed in mock self-depreciation. "The physicist that bought a convertible. Too funny." Step three.

"I'm so sorry, I never asked. What do you do?" He had to stifle an internal laugh at the unintended double entendre. Loki pulled to the curb and parked at the approach to the Route 9A entrance ramp.  
"I'm a particle physicist who doesn't know his own limits," he threw him a warm smile and promptly hopped out of the car, switching seats. The intrigued gaze Loki sent his way as the two men passed each other on their journey to opposite seats sent a ripple of invigorating success through his chest.

"Your turn," Loki pointed at the highway ahead. "Have _fun_." Bruce flicked through the digital menus he remembered from Tony's car, promptly finding the Sport option and enabling it. He didn't dare look over, but he could feel Loki's questing eyes on him. He signaled, checked his mirrors, and gently crushed the gas pedal to the floor. Mid morning, northbound, very little traffic, all emboldened his swift acceleration. They were pushed back in their seats as the small car converted hydrocarbons to velocity. Once they were at speed, Bruce let out the breath he was holding.

"I don't know about you, but I could get used to that." Loki laughed, warm and unrestrained. It was a beautiful sound and made something deep within Bruce purr in appreciation.

 

***

 

The test drive was over all too soon and under Loki's direction, he parked it on the curb in front of the showroom. The taller man shifted in his seat and donned the salesman mantle once again.  
" _So_ , what are we thinking? You want to take another look at the sedans?" His lips quirked into a friendly and knowing expression.  
"Uh, no, probably not. This is an _awesome_ car. I-I just... I think I need to think about it." He grimaced apologetically. "It's a big purchase and this is my first car in about fifteen years, believe it or not."  
"Oh, _wow_. Well, I am _so_ honored you stopped in today. No pressure at all. I think you and this car were made for each other. You can get it in any color you want, we can go over all the options, but yes - first think about it and then get back to me. He procured a business card from his suit coat pocket and offered it between two elegant fingers. "Let me get some info for you before you go. Just hang out here, get a feel for the car. I'll be back in two quick seconds."  
Excellent tactic. Low pressure, leaving the customer with the merchandise in a calibrated display of trust. Let them take a minute alone with the product, imagining it as their own. But Bruce was doing the same. He'd thought long and hard about his tactics over the past weekend.

Dangling a sale. Insinuations of power and connections. Drawing him in with opaque references to his lifestyle, his history. Companionable silence, breathless thrill, and stoic confidence. An intriguing melody falling by notes onto the sheet.

Loki returned to the car and Bruce got out of the driver's seat. They exchanged keys for glossy brochures.  
"Here. Take a look, again no pressure. I want to make sure that you get the right car for _you_ , especially after so long."  
"Thank you. This was a lot of fun."  
"No, the pleasure was all mine, Bruce. _Thank you_ for starting out my Monday like that." He extended his hand. Bruce had to force himself to release it after the socially appropriate amount of time had passed and walk away without looking back, knowing that Loki was staring after him. _Loki._ Perhaps not his Loki, Bruce was pretty sure of that. But Loki all the same. Different path, same man.

He turned a corner and stopped to catch his breath and slow his heart. It was too good to be true! Loki _existed_ in this universe. A huge burden lifted from his shoulders. And he had a way of contacting him. No, Loki actually _wanted_ him to contact him. For profit, sure, but that didn't deter the ecstatic joy that raced through his veins and carried him on a cloud all the way back to Stark Tower.

 

***


	26. Chapter 26

Step Four.  
  
"Audi Manhattan, this is Lucius."   
"Hi Lucius, this is Bruce. I stopped in yesterday to look at the TT?"   
"Hey, Bruce. How are you doing?" He could hear his smile through the phone line.  It was such a novel experience.  
"Good, good. I've been thinking a lot about the car and, frankly although it's not as practical as I was originally looking for, I think I'm going to go with the Roadster."  
"Oh, that's _excellent_ news. I'm so happy you liked it." Obligatory conversational banalities.  
"Yeah, I'm excited. The only thing I'm not sure on is the color. Tony... heh, he thinks I should go for one of the Exclusive colors. What do you think?"   
"It's not a bad option if you're looking for something distinctive," Bruce knew Loki's current incarnation could hear literal dollar signs through the line but he couldn't blame the man one bit.    
"So... I'm a bit tied up today and can't stop in. Would it be at all possible to meet you after 6 to discuss options?"  
"Sure, that's no problem. My evening is free. Where did you have in mind?" So open, so eager. It whet Bruce's appetite. He gave him the name of a Midtown restaurant and the two men made plans to meet.

Honestly, Bruce didn't have the cash for a car. He could barely cover the laser eye surgery he'd gotten only weeks earlier. But being friends with Stark has its benefits. Once he'd told Tony about the car, the billionaire was all ears, attentive in a slightly creepy way. The customization had truthfully been his idea, too. And it fell perfectly in line with Bruce's plans to get to know 'Lucius' better.

The hours crept by and Bruce found he was physically fighting the urge to get to the restaurant early. No, a late arrival was necessary. Make him wait. Make him see how busy and important and intriguing you are. Entice him.

If he stopped to think, this pattern of pre-meditation should have scared Bruce, but he was in too deep for productive introspection.

He carefully picked out an old but well-cared-for cable-knit sweater, grey slacks, and 'borrowed' one of Tony's heavy wristwatches. He didn't bother with his hair, hoping that the unrushed, soft, tousled curls would work more in his favor tonight. The restaurant was only a few blocks from Stark Tower, so he walked down, announced himself to the hostess, and suddenly, once again, found himself face to face with Loki.

Off-duty, certainly. The suit coat remained, but the tie was gone. The top button of his white dress shirt undone. One arm stretched over the back of the leather upholstered seat set into the wall. The Hulk was awake in seconds, Bruce's heart sped so swiftly. God, the man was gorgeous no matter what persona he adopted.  
"Lucius."  
"Bruce. Thanks for the invite and for taking the time out of your day. Been busy?"  
"Yes, in a manner of speaking. But I should thank _you_ , I'm eating into your personal time." Loki waved off the apology.  
"Nonsense. This gives me a good excuse to try this restaurant. It's been on my list for a while." Another thousand watt smile. Bruce was grateful he was sitting down as the full onslaught of Loki's attention turned his knees to water. Again.

They perused the menu, ordered drinks, entertained common chatter. By the time the main courses arrived, Bruce was thoroughly certain he was successfully charming the other man. It thrilled him to no end.

"Pesto Fusilli? Interesting choice for a _steakhouse_." He raised one eyebrow at Bruce's selection.  
"I'm vegetarian. Don't hold it against me," he chuckled, holding his hands up in mock surrender. Loki chuckled, and for a moment Bruce swore he saw a flash of curious recognition in his green eyes. No, that was absurd.  
" _Never_. Just as long as you don't try to convert me. I like my filet too much to change." There was the suave, toothy grin again.  Bruce succeeded in not choking on his pasta.  
The conversation flowed easily the entire evening, and in time Bruce was sure Loki had dropped the role of salesman and was flirting with him simply for the sake of flirting. Not to close a deal.

When the waiter arrived to clear their plates, a sudden realization dawned on Loki.  
"Did we spend the whole evening talking and forget entirely about the car?" Bruce forced a genuine-sounding laugh.  
"I think so. Oh, just put me down for that dark teal color. I forget the name." Bruce captured the bill before Loki could reach it and paid despite obsequious protests.

They gathered their jackets and spilled out onto the streets. The sun had set hours ago and an unexpected chill made their breath fog into the air. It was an awkward silence now. Bruce had run out of strategy and nearly exhausted his contrived extrovert energy. Their feet aimed to walk in opposite directions and Bruce knew his Cinderella moment was over. For now.

"Thank you for a fantastic evening. We should do this again," Loki offered.   
"I agree, this was a lot of fun." Their gazes met. And clung. The weight of their mutual stare was impossible to break. The air around Bruce suddenly disappeared and he could feel a minute shift in Loki's stance. Was he imagining things? What did it matter? What did he have to lose? The impulse was inexorable, undeniable, and Bruce lifted his hand to cup Loki's chin, meeting his lips a swift moment later before he could stop himself.

He was so warm in contrast to the night air, blood rushing under his skin. Bruce savored the sweet scent of port on his mouth before forcing himself to pull back, chaste but eager.

Loki opened his eyes slowly but deliberately.  
"If you are trying to seduce me... you are _succeeding_." His tone was husky, his pupils wide. It was Bruce's turn to smirk.  
"Not _trying_ , no." He stuffed down the feeling of incredulity at his own charisma. Provoked, Loki brought his hands to Bruce's jawline, melding their lips together. This was a dream. This was beyond reality. When had Bruce ever deserved to be this lucky? As their passion built, Loki walked him back against the wall of the nearest building, out of the sparse lane of pedestrians and levying his height advantage to deepen their kiss.

He was heady with success and pleasure, and time slipped through his fingers. All too quickly, Loki was pulling back, their lips parted but faces still close and intimate.  
"You are an enigma, Bruce Banner."  
"Am I?" He was too breathless to feign disbelief. Loki kissed him again, pulling on his bottom lip as he pulled away and shooting desire straight to Bruce's groin.  
"Undoubtedly. Let me buy you dinner next time." Bruce grinned slyly.  
"Does the night have to end so soon?" The doctor pulled him down for another kiss by his coat lapels.  
"Ugh. Yes, I'm afraid," he moaned his regret. "I'm _sorely_ tempted by you, and I think for that exact reason we should continue another night." Bruce was disappointing, but he couldn't fail to see the logic. He was in deep, _far too deep_ and drowning. He would undoubtedly slip and make a fool of himself, be much too familiar _much_ too soon, freak Lucius out and ruin the glimmering hope he held in his hands. He placed a chaste kiss on his mouth instead.  
"Let me at least get you a cab."

 

  
***

 

As Bruce fell back into his bed in Stark Tower that night, he couldn't stop the elastic grin that split his face in two. Unadulterated joy and the heady elixir of success kept him from sleeping until the early hours of the morning.

Tony certainly noticed when Bruce slunk into the lab very late the next morning, a silly smile still creeping onto his features unexpectedly.

"Bruce _Banner_. Do you know what time it is? If I didn't know better, I'd say you got laid last night."  
"Ha, Ha. Far from it. But I did have a pretty good date." Nothing to lose, remember, Banner? Cards on the table. A new Bruce. Tony's eyes popped open.  
"Date? Seriously?! Mr Calm and Cautious? Oh my, I do believe the world is coming to an end. When do you date? How did you meet? How did it go? Where did you go? What is she like?" His relentless diatribe let up just long enough for him to shoot a lascivious grin in Bruce's direction. "How big are her..." he gestured at his own chest, "assets?"  
Bruce laughed so hard he had to clutch the lab table to keep from falling over.  
"Holy god, Tony. You're like a teenage girl." That didn't stop Tony from leering in expectant anticipation. "It's not a her, it's a him."  
Tony's jaw dropped open. It took him several seconds to recover and snap it shut.  
  
"Who are you and what have you done with Doctor Banner?" Bruce chuckled at the unfamiliar attention. "I am so thrilled for you. This is _huge_. This is _beyond_ huge. Is it serious yet? When do I get to meet him? Oh, you've got to invite him for dinner. Pepper is going to be ecstatic. I didn't know you were dating? I thought..." he searched for words, then tried to backpedal, but Bruce caught him before he could escape.  
"...that Natasha and I...? No, not in this lifetime at least. I like women, I do, but this guy..." he grew quiet for a moment, trying to find the right words to compact the last two years into a succinct statement. "He's insane. I-I mean, not _insane_ , but amazing." Bruce shook his head to clear it and Tony leapt on the gap in the conversation.  
"I get it. Trust me." He smiled softly. "If it's still early days, no worries, but if things... develop? I _totally_ want him here for dinner." Bruce's smile was honest and full of affection.  
"Thank you, Tony."

 

***

 

Bruce made good on his promise to purchase the car, and Loki took him out to a Turkish restaurant to celebrate. It was a whirlwind week where Bruce pulled him out of the office for lunch, Loki took him for after-work cocktails, evening jogs through Central Park.  And finally invited him back to his apartment. All pretense was off the table as soon as the lock clicked in the door behind them. Loki pierced him with the look of a hungry predator and proceeded to devour him one piece at a time. The success over the past few days plus the one glass of wine he'd allowed himself made him heady, and he couldn't deny the impulse to remove his suit coat, unbutton that constrictive shirt, and leave the taller man bare chested but for his loosened tie. He used it to pull him closer and guide them to the couch. He pushed him to sit and then straddled him, using his temporary height advantage to devour his mouth while tracing patternless tracks all over his smooth skin. Loki let him do as he pleased, resting his own hands on Bruce's hips, kneading into the cloth-covered muscles. He kissed down Loki's neck and the resulting gasp brought what little blood he had left racing to his trapped erection. He wanted this _so bad_. He thought he'd been denied it, thought it was lost forever. He remembered every curve of the other man's body, and knew much of what made him writhe. The memories filled him with heat. But there was so much still unexplored about this man after their scarce few intimacies. The possibilities that lay in front of him made his head spin deliciously.

"Pants, off," he growled, unwilling to concede control of the situation. Not yet, at least. Loki quickly compiled and Bruce used the opportunity to undress himself as well. He straddled the younger man again, spitting into his hand and slicking their paired cocks together with slow, even strokes. Loki threw his head back, grasping the back of the couch in both outstretched hands, his knuckles white.   
"God...!" his pale throat bobbed up and down as he swallowed compulsively, words bereft. Bruce grinned through his own pleasure at finally silencing the silver-tongued god. He was so _human_ , so visceral, fallible, within reach. It was intoxicating to dominate him. Bruce attacked his exposed neck again, sucking hot wet circles into his jugular.  
"Do you like this?" he whispered into his ear. Bruce increased his tempo. "Have you been thinking about this all week? I know I have. About feeling your cock against mine, about teasing you..." he slowed down the pace of his hand. Loki moaned wantonly. "About _watching_ you, about making you _beg_..." He slowed down further, to a snail's pace and rubbed his thumb deliberately over the throbbing head of Loki's cock.  
"Oh, please. _Please_ , doctor. I-" he forced his shut eyes to open when Bruce didn't respond, didn't acquiesce to his pleads. "You _evil_ man." The gaze he leveled at him was full of fire. Bruce needed no more prompting, returning to his frenetic tempo and wresting a wanton moan from the lips that dropped open, the head that dropped again to the back of the sofa. He could feel Loki's stomach muscles tense and watched like a man dying of thirst as Loki lost himself in pleasure, spilling his release across Bruce's hands. It was beyond ecstasy to watch the younger man lose control. His demi-god, his villain, his seducer, his trickster, now human and trembling slightly in the aftershocks of passion.

Bruce could feel his own peak crescendoing, and pulled away just in time to erupt across the couch cushions instead of over Loki's stomach. He gritted his teeth, groaning as his own hand stroked out the last of his pleasure. Then he collapsed next to Loki, clean hand running through his short dark hair and pulling him into a deep kiss.

'You amazing creature.'   
'God, I missed you.'  
'Don't go anywhere.'  
' _Promise_ me.'

He wanted to breathe it all into his ear, but settled for communicating through his kiss instead. They pulled away, breathless and flushed.

"My good doctor. You are a _demon_." Loki's weary mouth quirked at the edges, his eyes alight with mischief.   
"Just for you," he teased truthfully, walking to what he imagined was probably the bathroom to clean up.  
They traded places when Bruce returned, Loki cleaning up as well. When he returned, he was clad in a pair of low-slung sweatpants and offering Bruce a robe. They enjoyed the aftermath, kissing slowly. When they finally parted, Loki ventured a question.  
"I should have asked before. But you make my logic totally dissolve. Are you clean? I am: I checked last week just in case." _Fuck_. He could lie again, but so open and exposed, Bruce knew it was futile. An amateur in the presence of a consummate professional. He would be seen right through.  
"No, shit. I'm sorry, that was incredibly stupid and selfish of me. But... I haven't been with anyone for... a long _long_ time." Bruce forgot how long. No one other than Loki certainly, with whom time moved in non-linear patterns. "And I was clean then." That seemed to satisfy the other man, whose concerned brows slightly uncreased.  
"So, why pull away then? I know we haven't known each other very long at all, but... it strikes me as odd." Fuck. Fuck! Now what? What lie would suffice? Perhaps none at all? Bruce tried telling himself he still had nothing to lose, but knew he was lying to himself. Now he had _everything_ to lose.  
"Well, I'm a physicist. And sometimes I don't know my own limits. Remember?" That was a stupid thing to say. He shook his head, trying to clear the embarrassing miasma that had settled around him. "An experiment went wrong and I'm worried that there may be a residue of gamma rays in my bloodstream. So... I don't want to risk it." He closed his eyes, bashful and mortified. It was so stupid, so idiotic...  
"Gamma rays?" Loki's pondering tone of voice caught his attention and he glanced up. The crease in his brows was back, but deeper his time, fighting for something. "Why does that sound familiar?"

Bruce's blood ran cold. No, not possible.  
He didn't want to entertain the evil temptation, but the scientist in him couldn't help prompt.

"Does it?"  
"Yes... put I can't put my finger on why." The confusion remained on his face for a few moments longer until he shook it away. "That's impossible. In any case, _thank you_ for being honest with me."   
"Of course. It's the least I could do."  
  
And while the air was again benign and peaceful, Bruce's brain began racing a million miles an hour.

 

  
***

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am doing my darndest to get all of this edited and posted before the spring semester starts. Please send good vibes my way!


	27. Chapter 27

Lucius became Bruce's new favorite experiment. He rented the movie Altered States, hoping the scenes with sensory deprivation tanks would potentially spark Loki's memories. They went to a public talk at Columbia about theoretical alien megastructures, hoping the discussion would prompt remembrances of the Dyson Sphere. Lucius was confused, doubtless, but Bruce was starting to think it was more about his own actions and their future together than any potentially missing memories. He backed off. Loki was too precious to lose, even if the questions gnawed at him relentlessly.

They were walking back from an Ethiopian restaurant, enjoying the crisp air and each other's company. It was wonderful to be in Manhattan and be able to walk hand in hand with another man without fear of reprisal. Bruce was simply basking in how lucky he was and debating about asking Loki over to Stark Tower for the dinner Tony had promised several weeks ago.

As they were crossing in front of an alley, an arm reached out and pulled Bruce into the shadows. A flash of silver in front of his face and suddenly he was facing down a knife.  
"Wallets and watches. _Now_. Don't get smart." The easy, safe route was to forfeit his possessions.  Bruce slowly reached for his coat pocket, simultaneously trying to indicate he was unarmed. There was no sense in letting the Hulk out, even as badly as he could tell the other wanted to. The adrenaline was palpable in the air. Another two figures stepped out of the shadows, menacing Loki as they wrenched Bruce's arms behind his back.  The Hulk waited on the tip of his tongue, on the next breath.  It was all he could do to keep him at bay.  
"Bruce-" Loki started, but the others cut him off.  
"You think we're asking nicely? Empty _your fucking pockets_." Bruce tried imploring Loki with his eyes, but as the knife blade descended to his throat to threaten, Loki pounced. He ducked and swept the first man off his feet with his lower center of gravity, bringing his extended leg up in an arc to knock the second man off his feet, pasting him against the wall. When the first stirred on the ground, he brought the heel of his polished wingtips down on the man's shoulder, breaking his collarbone with a wet pop.  
"I fucking warned you!" the third man shouted, digging the knife into Bruce's skin. The Hulk screamed at him, willing him to change. He knew he had precious seconds before it was no longer his choice. He rammed his elbow back into the man's diaphragm, and he momentarily loosened his grip. Loki spun and grabbed his knife hand, wrenching his wrist back until it audibly bent the wrong way. The man screamed, and Loki grabbed the back of his head, tearing him away from Bruce and crushing him face first into the brick wall.  He collapsed, a bundle of rags on the ground.

The resulting silence was deafening. Bruce fought to get his pulse under control.  
"Loki.  Are- you okay?" The man was staring at his own hands in shock as the first two assailants picked themselves and their friend up and dissappeared into the darkness, cursing as they limped away.  
"I, I don't know what came over me. I... don't know how I did that." He stared into Bruce's eyes, looking for an answer. "I've never been in so much as a playground fight." His hands were faintly speckled with the blood of other men. "This feels so strange."  
"Like you've done this before?" Bruce left it as a question, not willing to push too hard.  
" _Yes_. Like... like these hands know what to do. Even if I don't." He was white as a sheet now, even more so than usual.  
"Muscle memory." He couldn't help it, but he wanted to take back the murmured words as soon as they were out. "No, don't dwell on it.  The important thing is _I'm_ okay and _you're_ okay. Let's get back to your place and we'll get cleaned up." Loki nodded and followed Bruce. A few blocks passed before he turned and said:  
"Who's Loki?"

Oh, christ. He'd done it, hadn't he? He had successfully refrained from calling out his name in bed a half dozen times now, but it had slipped out in the heat of the moment.  
Bruce stared at him dumbly.  
"What?"  
"Who's Loki? You called me Loki just now."  
"I-I don't remember. Did I?" Play dumb, Banner. There was no win here, only lose. Would he fly into a jealous rage, imagining Loki to be another lover? Or would he accuse Bruce of insanity? Or would the emotional distance between them grow, the questions multiplied without answer?  
"Yes, you did." He wasn't letting it go.  
"I don't know? A term of endearment? It's better than Lucious Lucius, right?" Oh god, that was cringe-worthy. Loki only looked at him like he'd grown two heads.  
"Yeah... maybe work on that." He nodded his head as if to reassure himself that it was just the stress of the situation getting to them both.

Not a word was said all the way back to his apartment.

 

***

 

Things were certainly more tense between the two men from that point. Dinners out only broached the cursory conversation topics of office work and politics. Movies were watched in comparative silence. But despite the emotional distance, they were still hungry for each other in bed. Perhaps even more so. Bruce was curled around the long, lithe body, sweat cooling on their skin. This was heaven, and he'd drink each second in as long as he could. In the darkness, in the relative safety of their shared embrace, Loki broke his stalemate.

"I've been thinking a lot, Bruce." Oh, no. A pit of despair started to form in his stomach. Expecting the worst. "About what happened earlier this week." Bruce held his breath, willing Loki to keep quiet. Willing to stay in his happy cocoon. "...I've been having dreams."  
"Dreams?" That wasn't what he was expecting. Bruce let out the breath he was holding.  
"Very _strange_ dreams. You remember that movie we watched about the researcher on drugs?" Bruce nodded against his skin. "About... waking up in a tank like that. About you and I running through an endless corridor...." He sighed, expelling tension into the air. "And about those thieves. But instead of them, they are hideous creatures with blue skin. And... I _kill_ them. _All_ of them. It's horrific." Bruce knew he had to tread carefully.

"That sounds awful. I sometimes have dreams about sensory deprivation tanks, too. About you pulling me out of one. About fighting together through armed guards." He paused for a breath, letting his words dissolve in Loki's mind. "I've never had a dream about blue creatures, but I have dreamt about a portal and a horde of insectoid aliens... And you're there, with a blue staff in your hand, fighting."  
" _What?!_ " his exclamation was a mere rasp, the words nearly stuck in his throat.  
"...Have you had dreams like that too?"  
" _God, no._ That sounds terrifying." He seemed unsure despite his words and the silence that stretched between them begged Bruce to break it. But he couldn't, not for fear of shattering the lovely reality that lay naked between his arms. Which was wrapped around his legs.  
"No more sci-fi zombie movies, agreed?" Bruce chuckled, half relieved, half sorrowful.  
"Agreed."  He planted a chaste kiss on Bruce's lips and all was forgiven.

 

***

 

It wasn't long before Tony began egging Bruce about his phantom boyfriend. After all, it had been nearly two months. Seven weeks and two days, actually. Why hadn't he brought him over, introduced him? Was it too early? Not really. Was he thinking about breaking it off? Absolutely not! Was he afraid Tony would embarrass him? Uh, emphatically yes.  
Pepper and Natasha grinned at that, but joined in all the same.  
"C'mon Bruce, I'll keep Tony under control. Well, as much as I can." The pretty strawberry blonde smile playfully. "At _least_ tell us his name."  
"I don't think he can, I think Bruce is making him up altogether."  
"Tony! Really."  
"Alright, alright. I'll ask him. I'm sure he'll jump at the chance." Three sets of eyes waited expectantly. "His name is Lucius."  
"Ooh la la. _Lucius_. I bet he's handsome as hell." Bruce blushed. "Ha! I love it. I've never seen the good doctor turn that shade of pink. Where did you meet?" Bruce reddened further at Tony's words. If it was possible to turn a shade deeper than scarlet, he had found it.  
"Uh..." It was no use lying. Loki would certainly bring it up to Tony at dinner. "He works at the dealership you bought that atrocious purple car from." Tony's mouth form a tiny 'O' of surprise.  
"My _goodness_ , Banner. Now I know why you were so _desperate_ for that car." His eyebrows wiggled suggestively. There was nothing Bruce could say to retort, so he settled for silence.  
"Tony!" Pepper chided him goodnaturedly. "I think it's adorable. We can't wait to meet him."  
"I'll help cook," Natasha offered, eager to jump in. "Does he have any dietary preferences?"  
"Not really. The redder and deader, the better?" Tony grinned at that.  
"I have a feeling I am _really_ gonna like this guy."

 

***

 

Saturday arrived and with it, Loki with his short hair freshly trimmed and a green polo shirt stretched across his broad shoulders. Bruce met him in the lobby of Stark Tower. For all his nonchalance, Bruce could tell he was impressed. He could hide it from others, but Bruce knew him too well. They left the towering atrium and entered the elevator, Bruce pressing the button for the 81st floor. He quirked an eyebrow at Bruce.  
"Oh, only 81? I thought you were on a _higher_ floor."  
"Very funny, wise guy." Loki pecked his nose sweetly in return. It was so _weird_ being here with _him_ and not worried about people being thrown out of windows or bombs exploding or Hulking out. The only chaos tonight would be of Tony's own making, certainly.

The doors opened and Bruce led Loki into Stark's favorite lounge floor, decorated ostentatiously with bronze and dark woods. Pepper greeted them warmly.  
"Bruce. This must be Lucius?" He streched out his hand in greeting.  
"It's a pleasure. Thank you for the invitation to your lovely home."  
"Oh come here," Pepper batted his hand away good naturedly and pulled him into a hug instead. This was getting weirder by the moment. Bruce could compartmentalize his experiences and his memories of Loki from his current reality, but to see Pepper embracing the second prince of Asgard without a molecule of malice... it was... surreal.  
"Pep-per! Hands off the hunk. You know we talked about this..." Tony rounded the corner of the bar, scotch outstretched. "A little green birdie told me you're an Oban man, right?" Loki took the offered drink with a broad, warm smile.  
"Thank you, Mr Stark. I really appreciate the invite. I've been dying to meet Bruce's friends."  
"Oh my god, don't 'Mr Stark' me. I'm Tony. T-O-N-Y and this lovely lady is Pepper and she _will_ keep her hands to herself," Tony leveled a playful glare at his better half, a light rose dusting her cheeks.  
"Oh don't worry about _me_ , I've already got my hands full with this one." She kissed Tony lightly and took the wine bottle Loki offered. "Oh, thank you! Grand Cru Bordeaux? He is a keeper, Bruce." She chuckled and led them further into the room.

Natasha was setting silverware around the table. Several hot dishes already were spread out, steaming and ready to be served.  
"Lucius, this is Natasha. Natasha, Lucius." She looked up from the table, the warm smile draining from her face as quickly as the blood. There was one moment when the world stopped spinning for Bruce.  In the next heartbeat, she screamed. Everyone in the room froze in confusion. The redhead spun to duck underneath the table, launching a steak knife in Loki's direction before taking cover. He snatched the projectile out of the air in reflex, millimeters before it buried in his face.

"What the fuck?" Tony voiced everyone's collective thoughts. "Natasha?!"  
"Tony, it's _Loki_. Take cover!" She threw two more knives in his direction, but he batted each away as if they were errant flies. Bruce's heartbeat sped up to dangerous levels.  
Pepper slowly backed away from Bruce and Lucius, even as Tony continued to demand answers.  
"Come out and stop embarrassing us. This is Bruce's boyfriend, Lucius. Who the _hell_ is Loki?" There was a long silence from under the table.  
"I-I don't know. But... he tried to take over the planet. He tried... I remember... to _destroy_ New York. The Tesseract. Clint. Don't you remember?" Even she didn't sound convinced. But it didn't stop her from throwing the forks, now out of knives, at Loki.

Bruce knew this situation was only going to get worse. He put his hand on Loki's elbow.  
"Lucius, we should get out of here. Tony, I'm _sorry_ , let's catch up later." He pulled on Loki, but the man would not move. His face was stoic, fork gripped in his hand, knuckles turning white.  
"You've been lying to me. Haven't you, Bruce?"  
"Lucius, I haven't. What are you talking about?"  
"I'm impressed a little, really." His smirk was sad and ironic, with a touch of amusement.  "Muscle memory. The tank. The portal. The Frost Giants." He turned sharply, the full weight of his gaze pinning Bruce to the floor. "The oubliette. How you _screamed_. How _I loved it_."  
"Lucius... that's not what happened."  
"MY NAME IS NOT LUCIUS!" The veins jumped out of his neck, eyes bulging from their sockets. He gripped Bruce by his neck, backing him into the wall, lifting him up onto his toes. "How _dare_ you. Playing with my memory. With my emotions. With my _life!_ " Bruce only had eyes for Loki but in the periphery of his vision, he could see Pepper running to presumably activate Jarvis' defenses, Tony calling his armor in confusion, Natasha unholstering her sidearm.

No. No, no, no, NO!!

"You forgot just one thing," Bruce muttered sadly, the beginnings of tears spilling out of his eyes.  
"And what is that, _mortal_?" He closed his eyes and let the green take over.

 

 

***


	28. Chapter 28

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We are almost at the finish line, folks.  
> A little smut to brighten up your day.

Darkness. Silence. The absence of sensation cradled him in oblivion. Where was he? _When_ was he? How much time had passed since... whatever came before?   
   
Confusion surrounded him and clouded his brain. It hurt to think. The first thing he became aware of was an incessant beeping.  Like an insect.  Buzzing around his head and driving him mad.  The next was the cold feeling of metal encircling his wrists.  He couldn't move.  His heart rate sped.  
   
"L-... Loki?"  The voice was timid.  As it _should_ be!  If he could remember why... There was so much anger coursing through his body, but he couldn't remember what caused it.  He opened his eyes against the bright light, shapes resolving slowly into objects.  A display screen.  A sheet.  His own hands.  Clasped in another's.

Bruce.   
   
"You _loathsome_ wretch."  The words spilled from his mouth, laced with venom.  The other man's eyebrows knit, a physical blow.   
"No, I...  I-I didn't mean to.  I was trying to introduce it to you slowly.  You didn't remember."   
"But I did.  In pieces.  Didn't I?  You outdid the _king_ of liars, didn't you?  Congratulations, Bruce."  He could see the other man was crying again, silent tears down his cheeks.   
"Oh, Loki.  I didn't want to hurt you...  I only wanted to protect you.  I had no idea Natasha would remember.  And all at once... like that?  She... she must not be a construct of this place.  She must be another prisoner.  That's all I can reason."  It sounded reasonable to him, perhaps.   
"The babblings of a madman.  Who will believe you?  Do you expect _me_ to?!"   
"You _lived_ through it!"   
"Did I?!"   
"If not..." he took a breath to steady himself, "then who was that man in the courtroom, who told me 'forever' and made me believe it?  You didn't find me, _I found you_.  Is that the reason?  Reason enough to try and kill me now?"  He looked as if he knew the answer, but didn't want to believe it.  But Loki knew differently.   
"You think I _tried_ to kill you just now?  Ha.  Evidently, you don't know me at all."  He closed his eyes against the light, his head throbbing now that the adrenaline was wearing off.  He remembered... so much.  He remembered it all.  Laufey.  Thor.  Odin, Frigga.  All their lessons.  He remembered...   
"I don't know any more.  But I know they'll kill you now.  SHIELD is on the way.  Tony and Pepper don't believe Natasha, but doubtless someone else from their team will.  We three can't be the only ones stuck here.  _Someone_ will remember.  And when they do, they will make _sure_ you're dead."   
"And then I get out of here.  Again."  His flippant voice descended venomously.  "And you're _stuck_ , living out a life you know is a _lie_."  The cruel glint in his eyes cut through Bruce like glass.   
"Thanks.  I appreciate it."  He sat back, arms crossed.  "You selfish jackass.  I don't know what you want from me."   
"No?  Haven't you figured me out by now?"  His smile curved into pure trickery, self satisfied and gloating.  Bruce looked up, disbelief and confusion coating his features, contorting into shock and fear with each passing second.  "That.  THAT is what I live for."  He bared his teeth, clenched his fist and pulled on the handcuff of his right hand until it tore from the table like aluminum foil.  He reached over to Bruce, now the utter picture of terror, grabbed his shirt collar, and pulled a dimensional warp around them both.   
   
   
***   
 

  
Bruce's head _hurt_.  _Again_.  This was tiring.  Underneath his head was cold stone.  Above was a brutal light.  This felt so familiar...   
"Good morning.  How's your head?"  Loki's voice was light and pleasant.   
"You asshole," Bruce muttered into the floor.   
"Oh, come now.  No need for language like that.  I brought you to your favorite place, after all."  Bruce lifted his aching head to look around.  Stone, round, no ceiling, no doors.  The oubliette.   
"You sadistic bastard."  He was rewarded with a brilliant grin.  It was so out of place on Loki's human face: short hair, polo shirt.  The image was jarring.   
"Oh, _memories_."  Loki transformed into Bruce's mirror equivalent, including his old glasses.  "I'm just a sentimental creature, I guess."   
"Loki...!  What the hell?"  The god dropped to the floor, still wearing Bruce's skin, and got right in his face.     
"You're right, Bruce.  _Darling_ Bruce.  When I said I'd find you, I meant it.  But you beat me to the punch.  I can't blame you for that."   
"Please stop that, it's REALLY unnerving."  Glasses-Bruce transformed back into polo-shirt-Loki, grinning all the while.     
"I know.  That's what makes it so _fun_."  His eyes lidded, heavy.  "What if we were... intimate while I looked like that?  Would you like to try?"   
"Oh god, Loki, no!  Gross.  That is so, so wrong."  The visceral disgust was apparent on Bruce's features.   
"But why not?  Anything goes here.  _I've_ remembered my magic.  How to warp the rules of this place.  We can do whatever we want.  It's prison, after all!"  The glee literally radiated out of him.   
"There are some things that... just... no.  Gross.  That's a line I will not cross."   
"Ugh, you're no fun.  I, on the other hand feel _untethered_ , and it's amazing!  No guilt, no regrets, no fear, nothing to stop me at all."  He gathered a ball of magic in the air, sparking blue, rotating, crackling with life.  "Do you want to see the universe?  Anywhere at all."  Bruce had to admit, underneath the emotional whiplash he was enduring, the power that surrounded Loki was intoxicating.  "Just name it."   
   
Bruce considered, letting the temptation in the air and time temper his anger.     
"Anywhere?" he arched one eyebrow.   
"Anywhere, my dear."  His green eyes sparkled.   
"Beta Geminorum.  That's what we 'mortals' call it.  There was a strange pseudo-signal coming from there that Tony and I were working on.  I want to know what it is, if it's anything at all."  Loki's smile tempered into something far more tender and amused.  One hand balancing the floating orb, the other wove into Bruce's hair.  He kissed him, deeply and Bruce drowned in the feeling for a lovely moment.   
"I'm not sure if it sounds fun or boring.  Never been there."  He procured a piece of chalk from the air, handing it to Bruce.  "But give me a reference point and I'll do my best."  Bruce scoffed with good humor.    
" 'I'll do my best?'  I thought it was 'anywhere, no problem'?"  He turned and started sketching coordinates from memory, missing the mock-glare Loki threw his way.  
The tenuous balance between them had been restored.  For now.

 

  
*** 

 

   
One section of the stone wall was now covered in chalk.  Bruce was proud and unsurprised at himself simultaneously.  He was able to draw a fairly accurate celestial chart from memory: coordinates of Earth, Regulus, Betelgeuse, Alpha and Beta Geminorum were sketched out.   
He explained it briefly to Loki, who assured him he didn't need a Midgardian PhD to get them there.   
"All right, smartass.  Just try not to land us in the vacuum of deep space."   
"That's only happened once, I swear."  Before Bruce could protest, he landed a quick kiss on the shorter man's lips and gathered energy around them, whisking them both away.   
   
Bruce landed face down on the ground, _again_.  But this time, blessedly, it was not cold stone or even the frigid void of open space.  It was short grass, recently cut.  The pungency of spilled chlorophyll creeped up his nose.   
"You _really_ need to get better at this," Loki taunted from above him.  Bruce got to his feet, looking around.  Where were they, Kentucky?  Some golf course?  But then he looked up, the sky orange and quivering with intense light from a massive star hanging above.   
"...You did it."  He turned to Loki, disbelief creasing his features.  "I-I know this world is just a construct, and there must be different rules governing the physics than what we can observe, but..."  The dark haired man preened under his gaze.  "But... this is pretty mind blowing."     
"You're welcome."  Loki turned sharply on one heel, and started to walk purposely in one direction.  Like he owned the place.  Bruce didn't have ego enough to care, just following in wonder.   
   
"So, this is where the signal was coming from.  There must be intelligent life here.  There's clearly a breathable atmosphere and water and plant life.  It would stand to reason that _someone_ made that signal, not something.  Tony would flip if he could see this."   
"Why not?" was Loki's short reply.   
"Why not what?"   
"Why not bring Stark?  I have no reason to fear him, I have no reason not to show him this realm.  It would... be _ripe_ for mischief.  Imagine, Tony Stark on Alfheim!"  Loki was clearly in his element, features creasing with delight at imagined chaos.   
"Alfheim?"   
"Are you my echo?  Yes, the realm of the light elves.  I guess mortals call it Beta Geminorum.  Ridiculous name, but it makes no difference."  Bruce started to laugh, hard.  Loki couldn't help but turn, tapping his foot in silent demand of an answer.   
"Sorry, oh... my brain is such a mess right now.  Earth, Midgard, Norse Myths, Tank-world, the Dyson Sphere... up is down, left is right.  This is all _nonsense_."  He grabbed Loki by the shoulders, piercing him with a kiss.  His voiced dropped an octave with need.  " _You_ are nonsense."  His madman.  Brilliantly twisting the physics and rules of this world to his own purpose.  Loki responded in kind, kissing him hard, biting at his offered lips.  Each man could feel the other's growing excitement where their bodies connected and Loki pulled away reluctantly.     
   
"On Alfheim, there are elves.  Would it bother you to put on a display for them?" his question was mirthless and honest.   
"Uh... yes."   
"Pity."  Loki whisked them away again, but this time Bruce didn't find himself face first on the ground, but instead on what appeared to be a soft mattress.  Loki was on top of him without pause, biting at the back of his neck.  He lifted the edge of Bruce's shirt over his head, exposing his entire back.  Bruce shivered when Loki put his lips and teeth against his skin, biting hard but not enough to draw blood.  Just enough to drive Bruce crazy.  He moaned into the pliant material below.  Loki whispered into his ear.   
   
"Does he know?  Your green incubus?"  He continued to tease his fingertips along Bruce's skin as his words licked into his brain.  "You and he don't share the same mind, I've pieced that together.  He's a separate entity here.  I don't know what he is, but I know you and he are distinct."  For some perverse reason, Loki's words turned him on all the more.  "Does he know?"  Deep inside himself, Bruce could feel the Hulk grouse, uneasy and alert.   
" _Yes_.  And he's not a fan of you."  Loki purred, gracing Bruce's back with more marks from his teeth and fingernails. Bruce couldn't stifle a shudder.  
"Delightful.  Please let him know, that I'm going to do _very bad_ things to you.  Lovely things.  I'm going to own your body in a way he never has."  Loki lifted Bruce's hands above his head, conjuring something - Bruce wasn't sure - to bind his wrists together.  It only made him harder, if that was even possible.     
"God, please."  Loki preened under the compliment.  He unbuttoned Bruce's slacks with magic, but then teased both of them by pulling them off manually.  Slowly, over the curve of his ass, loosing his begging cock to the cool air.  Then the pants were of no significance and Loki crumpled them into nothingness.  He licked a line from the middle of Bruce's thigh, across his ass, to the top of the crease where his rounded cheeks met.  The doctor's breath caught in his throat.   
"Do you know," he whispered into his hair again while reaching underneath the man who lifted his hips to accommodate the cool hand under his body, "what I dreamt of between the time we _met_ ," he said the word with significance, "and when you found me on Sakaar?"    
   
Bruce couldn't speak, could hardly think through the anticipation curling low in his belly.   
"No?  It was of you.  _You_ , in pain.  No, that bit wasn't entirely pleasant," he soothed the other man.  Wrapping his hand around his confused cock.  "No, but later it was.  You, kissing me.  Your captive."  He continued to stroke Bruce.  "Or you, with your salacious mouth wrapped around some blunt instrument.  _Wanton_.  _Begging_ for a good fucking."  Bruce couldn't restrain his moan.  He was assaulted on all angles.  And it was so good.  "Are you begging now?"   
"God _yes_ , Loki.  _Please_."  He raised his hips higher, on full display for the man who was still fully clothed.  Loki abandoned his cock and instead brought his face to Bruce's smooth cheeks, kissing down, ever closer to his entrance, while he fondled his balls with varying pressure.   
"Let me hear you," he murmured.   
"Please, Loki, _please_."  He was rewarded with a long wet tongue lapping in closer and closer circles to his tight pucker.  When Loki finally reached the center, Bruce cried out, bucking back helplessly, his cock throbbing.  Loki attended to his tightly bunched muscles, laving inside and out relentlessly until he was sure any further attention would drive Bruce over the edge.  He left him then, standing and stretching his back.  Bruce whimpered at his absence.   
   
"Please.  _Please_.  Oh, you _bastard_.  Come _back_."  Loki tossed him a casual grin, just at the edge of Bruce's vision, loving his display, ass high in the air begging.   
"Of course, darling."  He slunk back, in full view of the bound man, allowing magic to slowing drip one piece of clothing then another from his body.  The shoes, the shirt, the slacks, everything until he was naked and pouring pure sex from his eyes into Bruce's.   
   
"You fucker."  Bruce breathed.  He was angry and frustrated and painfully aroused all at the same time.  Loki kissed his way down his bare back again, paying attention and stroking Bruce's cock while he slicked the fingers of his other hand with saliva, pressing into Bruce and opening him up.  The old fashioned way.  No magic at all.   
Bruce was little but a string of mewling whimpers, pressing back into Loki's fingers and forward into his hand in an absurd rhythm.  When Loki couldn't bear anymore, he slapped Bruce's ass, hard.     
"Are you ready?  Do you want this?"   
"That... is..." he struggled to gain breath.  "The _stupidest_ question I've ever heard."  Loki chuckled deep and low.  There was no more preamble.  He lined up and slowly sunk into Bruce, inch by inch while the older man gripped the bedclothes he could reach with bound hands, shivering in pleasure.   
   
Once Loki was fully seated, he began to move in and out, a steady rhythm that left Bruce breathless.  There was no room to beg anymore, to moan or plead or gasp.  He was beyond all of that, simply taking and experiencing the regimented passion of the man consuming him, 5000 years of skill extracting every ounce of pleasure from his poor mortal body.   
   
Loki's mind was, for once, blissfully blank.  He had no objective, no scheme, no malicious plot.  Everything was he and Bruce, melted down into a few inches of pleasure.  Selfishly condensing all of reality into a singular instance.  Bruce was so warm, so out of his mind with pleasure.  Loki _knew_ , he had seen firsthand how brilliant the other man was.  To bring that incandescent genius to heel, to turn it into a being focused solely on breathing and feeling and begging, was power incarnate.  He wrapped one free hand around Bruce's weeping cock, the other on his back, steadying his movements, and began to stroke Bruce again.   
"Bruce...  Doctor...  Lover...  Come for me," he commanded.  Bruce broke into a million pieces, mind obliviated in a fog of pleasure.   
   
Loki's chest and balls grew tight at the sight.  He didn't want to stop, couldn't stop the tidal wave of pleasure that crashed through his body and spilled deep within Bruce's.   
 

  
   
*** 

   
   
Time passed unobserved.  Bruce's fingers drew lazy lines across Loki's back.  Every muscle loose and languid.  Loki had flopped over Bruce's torso, nuzzling and licking over his stomach.   
"What will become of us, Loki?" he mused.   
"Hmm... don't you know how this ends?"  He nipped at the edges of Bruce's navel lightly.  "We continue exploring each other's bodies until the wardens pull us out.  And then we can start all over again."   
"Is that how it goes?"  Bruce was melancholy, and Loki couldn't abide it.  Not after all they'd done.   
"Can't you simply be happy, doctor?"  Bruce leveled a knowing glance at Loki, sprawled across his stomach.   
"I sincerely hope so."   
 

 

***


	29. Chapter 29

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Last chapter. Remember all those warnings at the beginning?  
> Good.
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When Bruce and Loki finally got back on their feet, Loki discarded the green polo shirt for his standard Asgardian attire.  When questioned, Bruce opted for his standard sweatshirt and jeans despite gentle ridicule from the demi-god.  They set out to explore the realm: Bruce focused on finding the elvish occupants and deciphering the signal that had made it 34 light years to Earth.  
   
Without proper equipment however, it was more of a scavenger hunt than a scientific expedition.  They came across several settlements, but none of the inhabitants seemed to know Loki.  It amused him greatly.  He could make himself anew at each village.  Bruce meanwhile, was simply in awe.  His time on Sakaar had not dulled the wonder of meeting a new sentient species.  The elves were both advanced and simple simultaneously, their knowledge diverting sharply from that of Earth.  More magic, less science.  More wonder, less skepticism.  But it wasn't all good.  Bruce yearned, after some weeks, for an indiscriminate fact-based methodology.  
   
Loki: in turns the indulgent host and mischievous child.  It was endearing, even if Bruce knew it shouldn't be.  And as ever, the consummate lover in bed.  
   
In bed, on the grass, against a tree, over the roof of a temple...  
   
This place was undoubtedly paradise.  
 

   
***

  
   
And then they found it.   
Bruce and Loki approached the largest settlement to date.  Loki mentioned the name, but Bruce promptly forgot it, instead drinking in the sights and sounds and smells of the busy marketplace.  It reminded him of the bazaars in India, but also the warehouse districts of New York.  Some things change and some stay the same.  
   
Beside him, Loki grew silent and still.  
   
"Loki?  What's up?"     
   
A shade appeared to pass over his face as he stared absently at nothing.  And then it was gone.  
"Hmm?  What was that?"  
"Did you sense something?  You're always better at this than me."  
"No, no, it's nothing.  I just caught a whiff of something delicious.  I think it's this way."  Bruce shrugged it off, even though deep inside something told him not to.  The Hulk?  His conscience?  Some puzzling foreboding shrouded his heart.  In any case, soon they were devouring a delicious spicy noodle dish topped with the local equivalent of basil and shallots.  Bowls empty, bellies full, Loki charmed their way into an invitation to the to the palace.  And Bruce forgot all about his worry.

  
   
***  
 

 

It wasn't until that night in their opulent suite, with the bed cold beside him, that Bruce woke and knew something was very, very wrong.  He searched the corridors of the complex, avoiding the guards deftly, following what he could only name as instinct until he approached the throne room.  
   
In the echoing throne room, the door behind the dais was ajar.  Just slightly.  Trepidation crept into Bruce's stomach like a lead stone.  Against his better judgment, he quietly entered the black corridor.  He felt along the walls, one cautious foot in front of the other, expecting the worst.  A bottomless cavern, a junction he'd never find his way back from?  But the hallway continued on, undeviating and endless until he could no longer see the moonlight behind him from the open doorway.  There were no sounds.  The damp air yielded no clues.  He was in a black void with the only points of connection the floor under his bare feet and the walls under his fingertips.  
   
He wandered without measure of time.  Until, he was sure his eyes were deceiving him, a ghost light grew out of the blackness ahead.  It became stronger the further he trekked until he could finally see it was another chamber, lit with some mysterious source.  The colors were numerous, a cycling rainbow cascading over the walls.  He crept forward slowly.  The silhouette of a man, his shadowed back turned, enveloped with the undulating hues.  A cold chill ran down his spine at the unnamed sight.  
   
Bruce was slightly stealthy, but in the end, only human.  Brash, uncouth, obtuse for all his hard efforts.  He must have made some minuscule noise to make the figure turn, the light following the path of his pivoting body, blinding his unaccustomed eyes.  Bruce put his arms in front of his face, defensive against whatever menace approached.  
   
"Bruce?"  
"Loki?!" his voice was suffused with disbelief.  
"I _found_ it."  He'd never heard this particular timbre from the demi-god's voice, deep and possessive and _wrong_.  Or maybe he had. A million years and a lifetime ago. It sent a chill through his core.  
"Found _what_ , exactly?"  God, he wished he could go back to their bedroom, fall asleep, and forget this whole enterprise.  
"IT.  The Infinity Gauntlet.  _Intact_.  Only missing one piece."  
"What?" Bruce was totally in the dark, but his skin crawled at Loki's zeal.  
"The Tesseract.  That's the only one missing.  And _I know_ where it is."  The triumph was evident in his voice.  Bruce approached, trying to exude calm when he felt anything but.  
   
"And what's the big deal with this gauntlet?  Seems like a silly thing to me.  Especially when you consider this place isn't really real at all."  Loki's laugh, long and low, was pure malevolence and Bruce despaired.  
"A silly thing?  _Silly?_   Yes dear, this reality _is_ false, but with this trinket: time, space, power, life, death, _all_ are reduced to mere puppet strings."  He was close enough to see Loki's face fully now, bathed in the light of the gems studded in what was really, a fairly tarnished glove.  The naked desire in his eyes made Bruce's flesh goosepimple.  It was jarring beyond measure.  Loki's human mask had pulled away and only the demon was left behind.  
   
"What difference does it make?"  Bruce tried and failed to keep his voice light.  "In the end, really?  All that control over nothing but a paper bag?  Come on, let's go back to bed," he pulled at his sleeve, but the gleam of power had condensed in his eyes.  
"A _paper bag_?"  Loki's tone was brittle now.  "This whole universe.  Yes, just a stage for an elaborate play.  But I've been _waiting_.  They've _made me wait_ 5000 years.  And now _this_ puppet has the key to their entire contrivance.  If I'm to be dust, then I might as well be king of dust."  
   
"Loki, _please_.  I'm begging you.  It's nothing.  This reality is nothing.  Why wage war on a universe that doesn't exist?"  
"If it doesn't exist, then why protest when I burn it all down?"  Bruce could feel his shoulders square.  He couldn't give quarter.  He just couldn't.  His moral compass wouldn't let him.  Ephemeral dewdrop or no.  
"Don't do this.  You _know_ I can't follow you.  I-I can't.  I can't watch you burn it all, I can't watch people _suffer_ , even if they are just zeroes and ones."  Loki stood straighter, arching his back.  He visibly snuffed the remaining light in his eyes.     
"I am _owed_ this.  They put me in a _box_.  They put me through 5000 years of _hell_.  For what?!  For one death that was ruled 'unlawful'.  Not even murder.  How is _that_ justice?!"  Bruce was desperate now.  
"I don't know, love.  I _don't_.  But I know this isn't the answer.  This is throwing rocks at toy soldiers.  It accomplishes nothing."  
" _Then what is your quarrel?!_ " he erupted. "Let me have my revenge, even if it is pitiful and impotent!"  The tears caught in Bruce's eyes now.  He was losing him, _again_.  And the finality of it tore him into pieces.  
   
He shook his head, not trusting his voice.  
   
" _Coward!_ You can't possibly make me choose between this and..." he couldn't finish.  
"Loki.  _Please_."  But he was beyond reason now, grief and rage boiling over into the purest form of revenge.  Bruce's apparent betrayal by standing in his way, robbing him of a clear path to vengeance lodged in his throat like a knife.  There was only one path forward.  Alone.  Even at partial power, the Gauntlet was a force to be reckoned with.  He clenched his jaw and let all useless sentiment bleed from his soul, purging himself of the mortal disease.  Loki raised the tarnished glove and leveled it at Bruce.     
   
Neither man had any words to convince the other.  And they both new it.  Loki screamed, enraged at everything in existence, including himself.  He fired a ray of pure energy.  Bruce, heartbreak tearing him in two, let go of it all and let the Hulk take over.  
   
 

  
***

   
   
Darkness. Silence. The absence of sensation cradled him in oblivion. Where was he? When was he? How much time had passed since... whatever came before?  
   
Confusion surrounded him and clouded his brain. It hurt to _think_.  The darkness broke in cracks at the periphery of his vision.  All at once, it was lifted and replaced by a blank white ceiling.  A figure swam into his vision, clad in a government-issued uniform.  
   
"Hello Mr Banner.  Please take some time to adjust.  You sentence has, _amazingly_ , been commuted again."  
   
Bruce dissolved into a flood of tears.  
 

  
   
***  
 

 

He felt like a plastic figurine as he was led from the incarceration pod to the courtroom.  The judgment and his subsequent freedom felt dull and unreal.  
   
He was given a complimentary shuttle to his dwelling, nothing much more than a faceless cube stacked within a myriad of other faceless cubes.  
   
Betty had left him.  That's what the 3D note on the wall told him upon entering.  Her beautiful brown locks framing her red, livid face.  He'd found love in jail?  He had no more use for her?  Well, _jerk_ , life was short and she'd wasted too much of it believing he loved her.  
 

 

 

So much the better.

He'd lost the game.  Lost his wife.  Lost his friend.  Lost his lover.

Better there was no one to watch him waste away, helpless and despondent in a foreign land.

 

  
   
***  
 

  
He wondered sometimes, in his circadian periods, whether Loki was happy.  Was he successful?  Had he laid everyone low?  Was he ruling the universe?   
If nothing else, he hadn't heard that he was dead and subsequently released from Hypno-jail™.  But would Loki have sought him out?  He'd murdered him after all.  The look of pure malice on his face, a shadow of traitorous condemnation leveled at Bruce, had been the last he'd seen of him.  Did Loki still feel wronged?  Highly likely, given his ability to nurse a grudge for centuries.  So Bruce gathered enough of his waning energy one afternoon to seek answers at the prison. 

It was true.  Loki had not been released.  Which meant that he was still alive in there.  Alive could only mean successful in his depraved ambitions.  Because after all, if Loki had failed, he would have simply reset the conditions to his favor, killed himself and escaped once more.

  
   
***  
 

  
Better to have loved and lost than never loved at all?  Bruce didn't agree.  After a week of numb disbelief, he gave way to anger.  He drowned himself in any and every opioid he could get his hands on.  Free of the Hulk, there was no monstrous nanny to prevent him from slowly killing his own brain cells.  
   
After anger should have come bargaining.  But he knew it was pointless.  Unless he committed another crime, they would never put him back in.  And he couldn't bring himself to do the same thing in this reality that he had condemned Loki for doing in their shared delusion. If he wouldn't stand for it in the paper bag world, how could he now?   
   
After anger was only depression.  Which meant more mind-altering opiates.  Less time in reality, and more time dreaming about the perfect world with Loki that was now entirely out of his hands.  Never meant to be.  The ideal existence where he each day, he woke to that mischievous smile curled across flawless lips.  Those beautiful enigmatic green eyes filled with contentment.  That porcelain body curled around his.  The three little words neither had said curling out of that mystic mouth into his wanton ears.  
   
But it was impermanent.  He'd come down time and again, back from that fantasy to blank and uncaring reality.  Loki had rejected him, given him up, killed him outright in his lust for power.  It was no wonder about Betty, she was simply too _good_ for him, wicked wretch that he was.  There was nothing for him anymore.  It was a cycle that he could not escape, regardless of which universe he was in.    
   
So he rejected it all in kind.  If there was nothing for him here, then why wait?  For what?  For more endless misery? For more self-hatred? It compounded itself with each passing day.  He'd been low before.  He was no stranger to the desperate, hopeless feeling that suffused his every waking moment.  He knew there was nothing beyond it.

Thus, logical to the core, Bruce locked himself inside his residential cube and downed a handful of opiates.  There was no Hulk to stop him this time.  He opened his veins with a knife, hissing sharply through the impermanent pain.  He made the lines of his final work long and deep.  Ever the skillful scientist, certain of his aim in this last act.     
   
The antiseptic environment had a multitude of benefits.  When the police found him days later, it was exceptionally easy to identify Bruce's cold, pristine body.  
 

 

 

  
   
***  
 

 

 

  
   
Darkness.  Silence.  The absence of sensation cradled him in oblivion.  Where was he?  _When_ was he?  How much time had passed since... whatever came before?  

"Hello, darling." A familiar voice whispered to him from the void and bid him open his eyes.  
   
The light was so overwhelming, it seared his optic nerves with bright pain.  Filling his vision, a verdant garden in bloom.  He could smell how _real_ and _alive_ it was.  Improbable.  Impossible.  
Blue digital letters glowed ethereally in the air in front of his face.  His mind rebelled, refusing to process the reality before him.  

 

SIMULATION TERMINATED

 

   
   
   
 

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**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Is that the end for Bruce and Loki?  
> In my mind, _never_. For this story, sadly yes.  
>  I may post a deleted scene in the future, but our tale is at an end. I hope you enjoyed the ride.  
> Long live gammafrost. :)  
> 


	30. Deleted Scene

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Deleted scene. I wrote it and then realized it was the wrong direction to go in, but I couldn't bear to outright delete it.  
> This occurs right after Bruce is re-incarcerated, and is wandering Manhattan on foot. For a distraction, for anything to clear his mind of the inexplicable sense of loss and to keep his thoughts from spiraling out of control.

Bruce had been walking for hours. The pavement continued to pass endlessly under his feet. Business people now. Offices closing. Blonde in a pencil skirt. Older woman, steel gray bob, vibrant lipstick. Delivery driver, chiseled jaw. Suit and tie, short black hair.

There was something compelling about him. He exited the glass doors of a building and strode along the sidewalk some distance in front of Bruce, phone to his ear in one hand, key fob at the ready in the other. His gait, the confident set of his shoulders. So familiar, yet so foreign. Bruce lost track of him in the swell of people until the man broke free to duck into a parking garage. Loki.

It was. It _had_ to be. His heart forgot how to function. But... it hadn't been Betty earlier, and neither had it been his mother. He jogged briskly, without care of the hot tea in his hand, to the edge of the garage.  He had to get another glimpse of him. But the concrete was defiantly empty.

But... that profile. Those _hands_. His hair was cropped short, but it was jet black. No, he was just fooling himself! He could feel his heart rate speed up in anticipation, but logic tried to tamp it back down. This was _impossible_. He was chasing a ghost. Betty could be substantiated. She existed in this reality. His mother could be proven too, there were photos somewhere, there had to be. His mind had led him on a merry chase earlier, but it was driven from memories. Real, concrete memories. This... this was a fiction.

A sick fiction concocted in his diseased brain. There _was no Loki_. There never had been. Thor proved it. The Asgardian had no brother. There had been no attack on Manhattan. No, this was just Bruce's overactive imagination, tripped out by transformation or gamma ray energy, or one of a thousand things Tony was probably clandestinely experimenting on him. But despite all these arguments, he was loitering at the edge of the sidewalk. He couldn't deceive himself. He was hoping for one more glimpse of this mystery man. To be proven _finally_ wrong or devastatingly _right_.

He fidgeted with his paper cup of tea. Was there another exit to the parking garage? He'd been standing here for far too long. His grip on time had become just as tenuous as reality. And just when he'd given himself up for insane, a black Audi turned the corner and descended from the upper parking levels. He forgot to breathe as it approached the pay station and the driver's side window lowered. A delicate pale hand flicked a parking pass over the sensor and retreated, waiting for the exit gate to raise. Bruce's gaze was captured, inexorably drawn up the length of the jacket-clad arm to the porcelain face, perched atop a perfectly knotted tie. That neck. Pursed lips. Proud nose. Those piercing eyes. They caught his for a micro-second and Bruce's knees felt like water. The car pulled into traffic and he remembered how to breathe.

Loki.

 

 

***

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, now there is officially no more! Is it safe for me to see Infinity War now?


End file.
